The full dataset viewer is not available (click to read why). Only showing a preview of the rows.
The dataset generation failed
Error code: DatasetGenerationError
Exception: ArrowInvalid
Message: JSON parse error: Missing a closing quotation mark in string. in row 115
Traceback: Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/src/services/worker/.venv/lib/python3.9/site-packages/datasets/packaged_modules/json/json.py", line 153, in _generate_tables
df = pd.read_json(f, dtype_backend="pyarrow")
File "/src/services/worker/.venv/lib/python3.9/site-packages/pandas/io/json/_json.py", line 815, in read_json
return json_reader.read()
File "/src/services/worker/.venv/lib/python3.9/site-packages/pandas/io/json/_json.py", line 1025, in read
obj = self._get_object_parser(self.data)
File "/src/services/worker/.venv/lib/python3.9/site-packages/pandas/io/json/_json.py", line 1051, in _get_object_parser
obj = FrameParser(json, **kwargs).parse()
File "/src/services/worker/.venv/lib/python3.9/site-packages/pandas/io/json/_json.py", line 1187, in parse
self._parse()
File "/src/services/worker/.venv/lib/python3.9/site-packages/pandas/io/json/_json.py", line 1403, in _parse
ujson_loads(json, precise_float=self.precise_float), dtype=None
ValueError: Trailing data
During handling of the above exception, another exception occurred:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/src/services/worker/.venv/lib/python3.9/site-packages/datasets/builder.py", line 1997, in _prepare_split_single
for _, table in generator:
File "/src/services/worker/.venv/lib/python3.9/site-packages/datasets/packaged_modules/json/json.py", line 156, in _generate_tables
raise e
File "/src/services/worker/.venv/lib/python3.9/site-packages/datasets/packaged_modules/json/json.py", line 130, in _generate_tables
pa_table = paj.read_json(
File "pyarrow/_json.pyx", line 308, in pyarrow._json.read_json
File "pyarrow/error.pxi", line 154, in pyarrow.lib.pyarrow_internal_check_status
File "pyarrow/error.pxi", line 91, in pyarrow.lib.check_status
pyarrow.lib.ArrowInvalid: JSON parse error: Missing a closing quotation mark in string. in row 115
The above exception was the direct cause of the following exception:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/src/services/worker/src/worker/job_runners/config/parquet_and_info.py", line 1529, in compute_config_parquet_and_info_response
parquet_operations = convert_to_parquet(builder)
File "/src/services/worker/src/worker/job_runners/config/parquet_and_info.py", line 1154, in convert_to_parquet
builder.download_and_prepare(
File "/src/services/worker/.venv/lib/python3.9/site-packages/datasets/builder.py", line 1029, in download_and_prepare
self._download_and_prepare(
File "/src/services/worker/.venv/lib/python3.9/site-packages/datasets/builder.py", line 1124, in _download_and_prepare
self._prepare_split(split_generator, **prepare_split_kwargs)
File "/src/services/worker/.venv/lib/python3.9/site-packages/datasets/builder.py", line 1884, in _prepare_split
for job_id, done, content in self._prepare_split_single(
File "/src/services/worker/.venv/lib/python3.9/site-packages/datasets/builder.py", line 2040, in _prepare_split_single
raise DatasetGenerationError("An error occurred while generating the dataset") from e
datasets.exceptions.DatasetGenerationError: An error occurred while generating the datasetNeed help to make the dataset viewer work? Make sure to review how to configure the dataset viewer, and open a discussion for direct support.
pred_label
string | pred_label_prob
float64 | wiki_prob
float64 | text
string | source
string |
|---|---|---|---|---|
__label__wiki
| 0.630947
| 0.630947
|
Art is my activism
Laiti takes a moment out from fighting the cause.
Jenni Laiti is looking out for Sámi interests.
Racism, inequality and structural violence have been part of the everyday life of the Sámi people for hundreds of years. The Sámi are Europe’s only indigenous people, located in Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia, and suffer from being a minority. The Sámi aspire to live in harmony with nature, and pursue a sustainable relationship with the land they live on. A continued denial of rights to make decisions about the land they own as an indigenous population has led to hundreds of years of confrontation – a struggle which has recently begun to gather momentum.
Jenni Laiti grew up in Inari, and was bullied as a child. Yet it wasn’t until she was a teenager that she began to understand that the reason was her cultural heritage as a Sámi, an understanding that motivated her to do something to change that reality.
Laiti is currently the spokeswoman for Suohpanterror, a collective activist group representing Sámi interests. She lives in Jokkmokk, Sweden, where Suohpanterror has supported the Gállok Resistance Movement against a planned iron ore mine. The mine would impact the health of the land on which the Sámi population live and herd reindeer. The refusal of the Swedish government to build the mine has thus far brought the biggest tangible success to the Suohpanterror movement – a success which, Laiti informs, has empowered the movement to ask for change – self-determination, self-governance, and indigenous/Sámi rights.
What was it like growing up as a Sámi in Finland?
When I was a child in Inari, every one of us in our neighbourhood had a Sámi background, but everyone was Finnish. We were away from our traditional culture, speaking Finnish and living Finnish lives. When I was a child it was quite a negative thing to be a Sámi, it wasn’t appreciated. But nowadays when you see the children and youngsters it’s a positive thing to be Sámi, people appreciate their identities.
It was rough. I think all the Sámi have felt racism in society, or bullying because they are Sámi. You didn’t want to talk about being a Sámi, you just wanted to hide it. A lot of my friends, especially boys, have been beat up and got into fights because they are Sámi. But it’s not only the bullying and teasing at school and in the social environment, but the racism and hatred that has been driven for hundreds of years. It’s also structural racism like not having the right to use your own language and the right to your own culture.
As a child did you understand where the racism came from?
I didn’t understand what it was. Later on when I was 14 or 15 I started to realise. I guess when you’re a youngster you start to search who you are and where you’re coming from, and I have an older sister and brother who were taking their culture and language back, so when they were in that process, I was driven to that. My family is a political family, so we’ve been discussing these things.
One of many Suohpanterror artworks utilising social media and visual activism. Credit: Suohpanterror
What do you mean by taking their culture back?
My father is a Sámi and my mother is Finnish, and he didn’t speak Sámi to us. In Scandinavia after the Second World War, children were sent to boarding schools, and were prohibited to speak their own language. Because of what happened at the boarding schools, these children who became parents didn’t speak Sámi to their children. My father didn’t want to speak his mother tongue to me.
I speak Sámi now. When we didn’t speak Sámi at home, my sister and brother took back the language and started to study it. After a while I switched to speaking Sámi with everyone who spoke the language. Sámi language is still my mother language because it’s my indigenous language. And I’m speaking Sámi to my children.
What are the attitudes of the Sámi towards the Finnish majority?
I think many of us also identify ourselves as Finnish, because many of us have one Finnish parent or inheritance. When we’re talking about racism it’s a question about the majority and minority. Usually the ones who are in the minority don’t hate the majority, they just want to be heard and respected. We don’t hate the Finns, we just want to live in peace and be respected – in the same way that we are respecting them.
How does the Sámi minority differ from other minorities?
We are a minority but we are also indigenous people. We were the first who were here. The difference between an ethnic minority and indigenous people is that an ethnic minority is not connected to the land. They can live anywhere. Indigenous people have a territory that they belong to. We have a history with our land. We’ve been living traditionally in our home area for thousands of years.
“We don’t hate the
Finns, we just
want to live in peace
and be respected – in
the same way that we
are respecting them.”
How does Sámi culture differ from the culture of the majority in Finland?
Sámi culture is indigenous culture. Our culture is based upon the land and it’s all about the connection with the land and living. One of the core values of our culture is living in balance with the nature.
When we use the term indigenous it means we were here first and this land is ours. We still have the connection with the land. That’s the biggest difference when you think about the Finnish and the Sámi culture. When we lose that connection, we’ll become disconnected and we don’t love and respect, or listen to the land. Disconnectedness is a one of the biggest problems in human history, that is causing the destruction of this planet, that is causing climate change.
Moreover, another of the biggest problems of humanity is that we’re not taught to think. We don’t think. We want to destroy everything around us. And when everything is suffering around us, we’re suffering. When the natural world is destroyed it’s causing more disconnections, ecosystems become weaker and they disappear. We have to start to think if we want to survive. We have to start to respect. We cannot just sit and watch TV, or be active in social media. We have to change how we relate to the Earth.
I think this engagement is possible when we all remember that we belong to each other. We have to remember that we have to connect to each other. We feel powerless, and when we feel powerless we don’t want to take responsibility. But when we’re connected we love life and we don’t want to destroy it, because we don’t want to destroy the things we love. Finnish people also had the connection with the land, but quite a while ago.
Hometown: Inari
Currently living: In Jokkmokk, Sweden, with her family, two children and fiancé.
Education: Studying Sámi culture at the University of Umeå.
Being a Sámi is… everyday survival. It´s hard, tough and exhausting. We have to fight everyday for our culture, language, livelyhood. But it´s something what I have chosen, the thing what makes me to be me. I´m nothing without my culture, that is the most important thing for me after my family.
In the future I… hope to see changes in the legislation and Sámi politics. I hope that we as a people achieve self-determination and we can live as a free people, because we have the inherent right to be free on our own land and the inherent right to self-determination. Freedom is essential to the survival of all peoples. If a people are not free to.
When I was a child I wanted to be… a lot of things, a teacher, a policewoman, a designer, but mostly I wanted to serve my people and improve our situation and make a difference in the society. And that´s what we are doing now, making a difference and changing the world.
How have the Finnish lost that connection?
The Finnish are, for example, living in big cities. Sámi people do that too, but when I’m talking about the Sami culture I mean the people living in the north, connected to the land.
Food is a good example, it tells a lot about our culture. Finnish people just go to the grocery store and that’s it. But the food is the base for the life. We collect berries. We do reindeer herding, we fish, it’s really important to us and our culture. Traditionally we use every part of the reindeer. We use nature as a source of living. It’s quite hard nowadays when our living areas are getting smaller and smaller because of the exploitation and land grabbing. And globalisation and climate change and everything. It’s a struggle to survive.
What needs to change for the Sámi culture to survive?
First and most importantly we as a people should have a self-government. We have the right to self-governance but the states – Finland and Norway and Russia – should implement the indigenous rights.
Indigenous rights are not special rights. They are human rights. They are compensation for the injustice that has been done in the past. You can’t change the past but you can make a better future.
Nordic countries have been colonising the Sámi area for the last 500 years, and they have been exploiting our land leaving emptiness behind, so it’s about a lot of wrongs that have been done in the past. The states are obligated to make a better future for us.
How is that change going to happen?
The land is not so large but the state owns the area where we live in Finland. Finland is only now in a process of ratifying ILO 169, a declaration about indigenous rights. It’s the first step Finland has to do. After it’s been ratified, they’ll have to start a process about the Sámi land rights issues. It’s been under discussion for many centuries but nothing has happened. This land is ours, not Finland’s.
What are the core ideas that are important for you about Sámi rights and culture?
The land is the base for everything. The question is all about the land. At the same time the land is the answer. We are made of the land. We live on the land. Land determines how to live in balance with the land and how to treat each other, and how to arrange ourselves politically. Our whole survival depends on the land. It’s not just the Sámi but the whole globe – everyone’s survival depends on the land. Land is not important just to us but for the whole of humanity.
When it comes to food – it is the land that sustains us and gives us food. We have responsibilities to it. We must take care of all the living, and we have to protect and respect the Earth. That’s also one of the core values of the Sámi culture. We want to live sustainably. We don’t want to destroy this. That would be a really stupid thing to do.
If the nature isn’t healthy no one survives. For me, a really important core value of the Sami culture is to protect our living environment and keep it healthy for the future generations, so there will be healthy environment for the future generations.
What’s missing from the dialogue between the Finnish majority and the Sámi?
Respect is one thing. It’s difficult to understand why one cannot respect or listen to the other. They are like companies, using the word ‘dialogue’, saying that they want to build a good dialogue. But it usually means a monologue, they hear us but they don’t listen to us. If Finland and the other Nordic countries would start to listen to us and respect us, and instead of the monologue that they call dialogue, they should actually have dialogue.
Why is the relationship between the Sámi and the Finnish majority such a sensitive topic?
I think for me, as an activist, it’s not so sensitive. It’s a topic we have to discuss. I want to raise this topic to the government.
It might be a sensitive issue for the Finnish government. One reason could be the land right issue. The state of Finland doesn’t want to give back our land, that’s the big issue. And of course there is a lot of racism towards us; we are not equal with the Finnish people.
How did you get involved with activism?
My personal political agenda is about indigenous rights not being recognised, and that Sámi rights are not on political agenda. We’re a small people, if we don’t fight who will? We have to have the political will to fight. The state has to have the political will to promote our rights. Resulting from hundreds of years of colonisation, my people are feeling powerless. That’s why I choose to challenge that power.
I’ve learned that there’s no change without protest. If we want to have some kind of change in our society we have to protest. For me, Suohpanterror art isn’t political art but it’s more political activism in the form of art. Art is my activism.
How does art become activism?
In Suohpanterror, it’s making posters which are published on Facebook and Instagram. It’s using social media as a tool to spread the word, in a new kind of activism, social media activism, visual activism. You reach a lot of people in the social media. It’s quite easy to share and like them.
What is Suohpanterror?
It is a Sámi collective artist group. Suohpanterror makes posters that are critical to society, and the structures of majority society. It’s a protest that happens on the border of art and activism.
Suohpanterror has social media activism, and has exhibitions. I, as a spokesperson, am travelling around and talking about issues what are important for us, and having workshops about art and activism and encouraging people to start to think for themselves. We want to mobilise everyone and get everyone active in this struggle, resistance, and protest.
The Sámi have been politically active from the ‘60s, but the states haven’t been listening. That’s why Suohpanterror has chosen this way to be active and make political change. It’s something new to make political art. Sámi artists began to be political in the ‘70s. Suohpanterror started in Facebook in 2012.
Why are a lot of your members anonymous?
We’re still quite small. We don’t want to talk about the people behind the movement. Suohpanterror is criticising society, so it’s a lot of sensitive issues that we don’t want to be personalised.
What has Suohpanterror as an activist group achieved so far?
In Sweden we’ve been protesting against mining plans in Gállok, Jokkmokk municipality, and achieved a lot in one year. The regional government just dismissed the Jokkmokk Iron Mines Enviromental Assesment Report. The Gállok Resistance Movement is growing and getting bigger and bigger. No more mining. No more land grabbings. We want to live sustainably; we want to have a better future.
The states have been ignoring the Sámi people and issues for so long, but now we’re bringing issues to the national level, and being heard through the art. Our people are thriving and we’re powerful now – we’re quite many artists making political art.
We’ve done a lot in the short term. We are lifting our people’s spirits. I hope that our pictures will continue to reach a lot of people and that they will start to think.
What is the ideal situation in your opinion?
The main goal is self-determination and land rights, then we can get self governance. To live as a free people in the future. The other goal is to live ecologically, in balance with the Earth and to protect it. That we, as a people, could live with self determination, and could self determine our own life as a free people, in a sustainable way.
We have the inherent right to be free in our own land, we have the inherent right to self-determination. Freedom is essential to the survival of all peoples. If a people are not free to determine their own future, then they cannot expect to survive as a distinct society.
Alicia Jensen
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cc/2020-05/en_head_0038.json.gz/line4
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__label__wiki
| 0.772635
| 0.772635
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Jon Gold Interviews Dan Christensen On "The People Speak"
Jon Gold Thu, 03/23/2017 - 12:00pm
28 Redacted Pages
9/11 families
Dan Christensen
JASTA
Jon Gold
Recently, I had the opportunity to sit in for Cindy Sheehan while she was on vacation. It was my first live show ever, and I had a lot of fun.
https://bbsradio.com/podcast/people-speak-march-21-2017
Click Here (mp3)
Dan founded Florida Bulldog in 2009 using the name Broward Bulldog. He is an award-winning former investigative reporter for The Miami Herald and Daily Business Review, and one of South Florida’s most experienced reporters. He holds undergraduate and graduate degrees in political science from the University of Miami.
Dan’s stories about Broward Sheriff Ken Jenne’s private business dealings sparked a federal corruption investigation that landed Jenne in prison in 2007. His stories about hidden and falsified court records in Broward, Miami-Dade and elsewhere in Florida for The Miami Herald in 2006 led to a pair of unanimous Florida Supreme Court decisions in 2007 and 2010 outlawing those practices.
Similar stories for the Daily Business Review in 2003-2004 exposed excessive secrecy in the federal courts. The executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press later called Dan “the nation’s leading journalist on an issue of tremendous First Amendment importance: the increasing trend toward secrecy in our nation’s courts.”
In 2000-2001, Dan’s reporting about a deadly gun-planting conspiracy and cover-up by Miami police resulted in the indictment of more than a dozen officers and significant governmental reform, including the establishment of Miami’s long sought civilian review panel.
http://www.floridabulldog.org/
Jon Gold's blog
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cc/2020-05/en_head_0038.json.gz/line5
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__label__wiki
| 0.823083
| 0.823083
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Houck Field House
Houck Field House is the home of the Southeast Missouri volleyball team.The 40,000-square foot building features a sports court as its playing surface. Houck Field House also has the ability to fit two regulation-size volleyball courts.Read More
Julie Yankus
Julie Yankus is in her sixth season at the helm of the Southeast Missouri State womens volleyball program. Through five seasons as the head coach of the Redhawks, Yankus has compiled an overall record of 73-88 and an Ohio Valley Conference record of 45-39.
Yankus teams have competed at the OVC Championship Tournament all five seasons under her instruction. Yankus has mentored six All-OVC Team selections, two OVC All-Newcomer Team selections, and two All-OVC Tournament Team honorees.
In 2012, her second season at the helm of the Redhawks, Yankus guided the Redhawks to an OVC West Division crown. The Redhawks finished 21-13 overall with a 12-4 record in conference play. 2012s record was the best record by Southeast since the 2007 season. Southeast Missouri was picked third in the preseason poll and finished the season first in the West Division and qualified for the OVC Tournament.
Carly Thomas
Southeast Missouri hired Carly Thomas as an assistant volleyball coach Tuesday.
Thomas joins the Redhawks after spending a year at Missouri State. She will coach the setters and be responsible for travel, film exchange, home match management and academic development among other duties.
“I am thrilled to add Carly to our staff. I believe her experience as a player and a coach will greatly contribute to our program,” said head coach Julie Yankus. “I know she will make an immediate impact with our team once she enters the gym.”
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cc/2020-05/en_head_0038.json.gz/line6
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__label__wiki
| 0.633706
| 0.633706
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ecological sustainability | Cottingham, Peter
Download Report (Adobe Acrobat PDF, 1008 KB)
1370 Visitors 1505 Hits 11 Downloads
Review of the Operation of the Cap : Ecological Sustainability of Rivers of the Murray-Darling Basin.
Whittington, John
Cottingham, Peter
Gawne, Ben
Hillman, Terry J.
Thoms, Martin
Walker, Keith
flow regimes
ecological sustainability
river health
Murray-Darling Freshwater Research Centre
"February 2000".
MDBC Project R10004 Ecological Sustainability of Rivers - Cap Review M/FOLDER/203
Publication no.
CRCFE Client Report
MDFRC item.
The Ministerial Council introduced the Cap on diversions from the Murray Darling Basin river system in June 1995, which in 1997 was confirmed as a permanent Cap. Two primary objectives for implementing the Cap were: -the need to maintain and, where appropriate, improve existing flow regimes in the waterways of the Murray-Darling Basin to protect and enhance the riverine environment; and, -to achieve sustainable consumptive use by developing and managing Basin water resources to meet ecological, commercial and social needs. With the introduction of the Cap, the Ministerial Council undertook to review its operation in the year 2000. The Ecological Sustainability of the Rivers component of the Review was undertaken by the Cooperative Research Centre for Freshwater Ecology, with input from submissions received from partner governments, the Community Advisory Committee and directly from stakeholders. The main conclusions of the Review are as follows: -Sustainability in the Murray-Darling Basin should be defined as the indefinite preservation of: - a functional and diverse ecosystem which, as well as meeting aesthetic and ethical requirements, provides a natural resource suitable for (all) human uses and production; and - a socio-economic system capable of using the natural resource productively to the maximum good of the current and future communities. -The development of the Basin's water resources, and in particular the reduced flows associated with these developments, has had a major impact on the riverine ecosystem. Impacts related to reduced flows include; - reduced areas of wetlands; - degradation of floodplain forests; - less diverse and reduced populations of native plants and animals; - exacerbation of problems of salinity, pest species, eutrophication and blue-green algal blooms; and - alteration of the shape of the Basin's rivers. -Because of water resource development, the Basin ecosystem is moving to a new and different state. This transition will require many decades to complete – with the full impacts of the current level of abstraction yet to be realised. -The Cap is set at a level of diversions that contributed to the current degradation of the riverine environment, and while the Cap is an essential step in slowing on-going decline, there should be no expectation that the Cap, at its current level, will improve the riverine environment. -However, without the Cap it is most probable that the health of the Basin's river system would be significantly poorer, as extractions approached the Full Development Scenario level. -Determining an appropriate level for the Cap requires science to identify ecological impacts of the current level of diversions and describe the long-term consequences of these impacts on sustainability. It is the role of the community, using this understanding, to strike the balance between the economic benefits and ecological costs of diversions. The level of the Cap needs to reflect this balance. However, the ecosystem itself will decide if the level of diversions is sustainable. -For the main part, the environmental benefits of the Cap, and hence its contribution to sustainability of the system, will depend on the skill with which the environment's allocation is managed. Provision of effective environmental flows are constrained by a lack of ecological knowledge, limitations of infrastructure, state boundaries, the wish to protect floodplain developments and timing and volume constraints imposed by the need to deliver water for consumptive use. -Indications of continued decline in river health suggest that current land and water management practise will require that the Cap allow significantly less extraction if the Cap alone is expected to achieve environmental sustainability. -Increasing the level of diversions in upstream rivers will further exacerbate environmental degradation downstream. These effects must be recognised when determining the level of the Cap in upstream jurisdictions. -The Cap has contributed (or will when fully implemented) to the sustainability of the river system by: - Restricting further diversions in all rivers, regardless of their current level of water resource development, thus protecting all riverine environments to the benefit of the whole Basin; - Protecting important high flow events – through limitations on access to off allocation that have been introduced to ensure Cap compliance; - Providing an incentive for more accountable water resource management, including conversion to volumetric allocations; and - In conjunction with other water reforms, provided a framework for water trading to develop. -The Cap's contribution to ecological sustainability would be enhanced by: - Reducing transmission losses across the Basin; - Returning all government funded water savings to the environment; - More efficient management of the environments allocation; - Basin-wide adoption of diversions models for evaluating compliance; - Rapid development of Computer Simulation Models to replace Demand Models for determining the Cap; - Defining the Cap so as to protect the proportion allocated to the environment from the effects of reduced catchment water yield; - Adopting the principle that all water in excess of the Cap is considered the environment's entitlement; and, - Integrating management of groundwater and surface water. -There is a need for an annual Ecological Audit of the Basin's river system. An Ecological Audit would assess the Basin-wide coordination, effectiveness and ecological outcomes of environmental flow management undertaken by the State's and the ACT. The Ecological Audit would also comment on the health of the Basin's river system by reporting the condition of a number of performance sites across the Basin. In terms of the specific questions raised in the project brief, the responses are: 1. Collate and assess relevant scientific and policy reports and submissions of the partner Governments and the CAC addressing the ecological sustainability of the river system of the Basin. A considerable body of scientific and management literature indicates that the health of the Murray-Darling Basin's river system has declined as a result of water abstraction, and that this decline is likely to continue as the full effects of past management practise occur. Scientific evidence indicates that further extractions from the river system are not ecologically sustainable, and that the existing level of extraction may not be sustainable. Much of this information is synthesised in the book, "Rivers as Ecological Systems – the Murray-Darling Basin". Relevant reports include the Stressed Rivers Assessments, Water Allocation Management Planning Reports, Scientific Panel Reports for the Murray, Barwon-Darling and the River Murray Barrages, and the NSW Wales Rivers Survey. Submissions to the Review were received from the partner governments to the Murray-Darling Basin Initiative, The Community Advisory Committee of the Murray-Darling Basin Ministerial Council (CAC), industry groups and directly from other stakeholders throughout the Basin. A number of issues relating to the ecological sustainability of the Basin's rivers emerged from the submissions including: - no consistent definition of ecological sustainability; - widespread support for a Cap to protect the ecological health of the river system; - disagreement over existing levels of environmental degradation and its causes; - difficulties in striking the balance between environmental impact and economic benefit; - insufficient scientific input into setting and evaluating the Cap; - no agreement on a sustainable level for the Cap; - greater accountability for management of environmental allocations; - the Cap alone will not ensure sustainability – other water management policies will be required; - the Cap needs to be supported by an integrated approach to catchment management; - confusion between impacts of the Cap and other water reforms; and - confusion about what the Cap is intended to achieve. 2. Address the impact of the operation of the Cap in achieving its objectives to ensure ecological sustainability of the Murray-Darling Basin river system by examining the following questions: 2.1. How Should Sustainability be defined for the purposes of the Cap? The Cap aims to make increases in production sustainable by fostering development, through more efficient use of diversions, without allowing growth in diversions. Production will only be sustained if both the ecosystem and the socio-economic system are sustained in the long-term. Recognising that sustaining the ecosystem that maintains the resource is the key component to the future of the Murray-Darling Basin, sustainability should be defined as the indefinite preservation of: - a functional and diverse ecosystem which, as well as meeting aesthetic and ethical requirements, provides a natural resource suitable for (all) human uses and production; and - a socio-economic system capable of using the natural resource productively to the maximum good of the current and future communities. In terms of its operation, the Cap must seek to apportion water between the riverine ecosystem and consumptive human uses such as to: - reserve sufficient water to maintain the ecosystem in line with ESD principles; and - preserve a supply of water suitable for human use. Leaving aside the socio-economic component, sustainability should address three fundamental ecological values: biodiversity, ecosystem function and ecosystem integrity. The appropriate spatial scale for assessing the Cap's contribution to sutainability is basin-wide and over a temporal scale of decades. The long-term decline in the Basin's natural capital (soil and water resources) indicates that we are failing the test of intergenerational equity, a fundamental tenet of sustainability. 2.2. What does science tell us about the suitability of the level at which the Cap is set? Determining an appropriate level for the Cap is a three-stage process – science addresses the first two stages: -The effects of the current level of diversions on the ecology of the river system have to be determined, -The long-term consequences of these ecological effects have to be clearly understood, and -With this understanding, the community has to make an assessment of the benefits and costs of diversions to determine an appropriate level for the Cap. Current levels of water abstraction are having a significant impact on the ecological sustainability of the Basin's river system. Throughout the Basin, Scientific Panel Assessments, Stressed Rivers Assessments and state water management planning reports have documented environmental impacts associated with reduced flows. These impacts include reduced areas of wetlands, less diverse plant and animal populations, and reduced populations of native fish, birds, macroinvertebrates and aquatic and floodplain plants. Reduced flows will continue to exacerbate problems of salinity, pest species, eutrophication and blue-green algal blooms. Reduced flows are altering the shape of the major rivers. In summary, reduced flows are a major cause of reduced river health in the Murray-Darling Basin. However, the full impacts of the current level of abstraction and other changes to the Basin's land and water resources are yet to be realised. The various ecological and geomorphic responses to the altered conditions that have been imposed will require many decades to complete. Assessing the suitability at which the Cap is set is complicated by the long-term natural variability in stream-flow of the Basin's river system and the long time-period over which changes occur. Also, there are few pre-Cap data against which to assess the environmental impact of the Cap. The focus should be on determining whether the current (capped) levels of diversions will conserve ecosystem function, integrity and biodiversity. This will require the continued development of ecological tools and techniques for assessing whether this has been achieved. It is clear from submissions to the Review that there is community disquiet over the state of the Basin's rivers. There is a strong desire to see an improvement in river health. It is also clear that further abstractions, anywhere in the basin, will decrease the health of the river ecosystem. 2.3. What aspects of the operation of the Cap constrain or support the sustainability of the river system? The Cap contributes to the sustainability of the Murray-Darling Basin river system by protecting end-of-system flows through limiting the growth in diversions, regardless of a river's current level of diversions. This protects the few remaining relatively undeveloped rivers from exploitation. The Cap has protected ecologically important medium and high flow events through limitations on access to off-allocation that have been introduced to ensure Cap compliance. In conjunction with other water reforms, the Cap has provided incentive for conversion to volumetric allocations and provided a framework for water trading to develop. Reducing transmission losses on water diverted to agriculture would enhance the Cap's contribution to sustainability of the Murray-Darling Basin river system. Information supplied by the Commission indicates that basin-wide at least 25% of diverted water is lost in transmission. Evidence from rehabilitation of South Australian irrigation schemes indicates much of this water can be reclaimed. At the Basin-scale river health will be improved by increasing the environment's share of water. Water saved from government-funded programs to reduce transmission losses should be removed from the Cap and be allocated to the environment. Water currently outside of the Cap (in-stream and environment's share) should not be traded into consumptive use. The volume of water needed to achieve sustainability will depend upon the provision of effective environmental flows. The delivery of these is constrained by a lack of ecological knowledge, limitations of infrastructure, the wish to protect floodplain developments, state boundaries and timing and volume constraints imposed by the need to satisfy consumptive users. Diversion models provide a more robust method of supporting the Cap than end-of valley flow regimes, which have clear technical problems with accurate measurement. Climate adjustment of diversions in the southern parts of the Basin ensures that a greater proportion of total stream-flow is diverted in dry years. Over time, the Cap should be defined so that it both limits diversions and guarantees a minimum proportion of stream-flow for the environment. 3. At a Basin scale, assess the potential hazards and level of risk to the health of the riverine environment (including algal blooms and salinity), and comment on the role of the Cap in containing these hazards and reducing the level of risk to riverine health. Export of salt from dryland sources to the aquatic environment is a major threat to water quality in the Basin and will impact on both water users and the riverine environment. Additional diversions from the Basin's rivers will increase the salinity of the remainder of the river downstream. The availability of dilution flows, the volume of which is protected by the Cap, will be an increasingly important constraint on salinity management in the future. Warm, slow moving, nutrient rich waters promote the development of blue-green algal blooms. Increasing flow can dissipate existing blooms. Further diversions from the Basin's rivers will increase the likelihood of conditions favouring the development of blooms. Also, increased diversions will reduce the capacity to provide flushing flows for diluting nutrient or dissipating developing blooms. The introduction of the Cap has not led to a reduced frequency and intensity of blue-green algal blooms however, it is likely that without the Cap, the frequency and intensity of blue-green algal blooms would be greater than it currently is. Predicted long-term changes in climate and land use in the catchment will significantly reduce catchment water yield, and consequently the volume of water in the Basin's rivers. This will have the effect of increasing the long-term proportion of stream-flow diverted from the Basin's rivers. Reductions in water yield from a catchment disproportionately impact on the environment's share. 4. Using two river valleys as the basis for case studies, assess the impact of the Cap to the sustainability of these valleys. 4.1. Lower Murray Regulation has significantly reduced the annual flow to the Lower Murray and the variability of mid-range flows so that the present regime is dominated by low flows with occasional high flows. As regulation has increased there have been declines in the range and abundance of many species of native plants and animals, including fish, crayfish, turtles, frogs, birds and mammals. In their place, species like carp and willows predominate. Modelling of the effects of Full Development Scenario have shown that the Cap has protected against further reductions in short-term variations in flow and the magnitude, duration and frequency of floods. Expansion to Full Development Scenario would exacerbate the loss of habitat diversity, reduce the frequency and duration of exchanges between the channel and the floodplain and change the metabolic functioning of the Lower Murray aquatic system. Due to the variability of the system, and the long lag times between the imposition of a stress and the ecological response, it is not possible to say whether the Cap has halted the decline in the integrity of the Lower Murray. It is possible to say that if the Cap had not been imposed, the move toward a Full Development Scenario would have resulted in further dramatic declines in the condition of the river. This decline would have affected areas such as the Coorong and Lake Victoria far more severely than other ecological components. 4.2. Condamine Balonne Large-scale intensive irrigation and flow regulation began relatively recently in the Condamine Balonne system. Diversions in the late 1990's from the Condamine Balonne system were nearly double the diversions reported in the 1995 Water Audit. Flow regulation now has a significant impact on the hydrology of the river, which has impacted on the fish and macroinvertebrate fauna. Further development in the Condamine Balonne catchment is likely to have a dramatic impact on ecological functions and eventually the sustainability of the river system downstream of Bourke. There is a serious risk that a Cap implemented in the Condamine Balonne (based on the WAMP) will fail to recognise the relative importance and potential impact of water resource development in this sub catchment on the ecological sustainability of the entire Basin.
MDFRC funding agency: Murray-Darling Basin Commission
MDFRC client: Murray-Darling Basin Commission (Now Murray-Darling Basin Authority)
Open Access. This report has been reproduce with the publishers permission.
Permission to reproduce this report must be sought from the publisher.
Copyright (2000) Murray-Darling Freshwater Research Centre.
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Archbishop's reflection on unrest
Reflecting on recent events before attending the recalled sitting of the House of Lords, the Archbishop…
Archbishop visits HMP Grendon - Guardian article by Andrew Brown
In an article published today in the Guardian Online, Andrew Brown describes a visit by the Archbishop…
Archbishop visits Alleyn's School, Dulwich
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, visited Alleyn's School, an independent co-educational…
Archbishop visits Charles Edward Brooke Girls' School
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, visited Charles Edward Brooke Girls' School in Camberwell,…
New Statesman Leader
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, has guest-edited the New Statesman in an edition published…
Literacy, dignity and freedom - article in the Evening Standard
An article by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, published in the Evening Standard as part…
Archbishop Rowan Williams and actor Simon Russell Beale on Shakespeare
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, discussed the work of Shakespeare with actor Simon Russell…
Archbishop discusses "The Good Book" with AC Grayling
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, met with philosopher and author AC Grayling to discuss…
Archbishop of Canterbury's 2011 Easter Sermon
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, delivered his Easter sermon this morning at Canterbury…
Thought for the Day - Maundy Thursday 2011
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, with his Thought for the Day on BBC Radio 4's Today…
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Church schools provide “biggest possible picture” for good citizenship
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, preached today at Westminster Abbey in a service to…
Archbishop visits Trinity Secondary School in Blantyre, Malawi
Archbishop Rowan Williams visited Trinity Secondary School, run by the Diocese of Southern Malawi, during…
Archbishop's visit to Camberwell Farmers' Garden
In the late September heat wave, Archbishop Rowan Williams spent time on Friday afternoon picking tomatoes…
Archbishop's sadness at death of Wangari Maathai
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, has expressed his sadness on learning of the death of…
Archbishop visits St Augustine's CE High School
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, visited St Augustine’s Church of England High School…
Archbishop hosts launch of USPG's Hands on Health
USPG Anglicans in World Mission launched their new health programme Hands on Health at Lambeth Palace…
Archbishop addresses Anglican Academy and Secondary School Heads
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, welcomed the Conference of Anglican Academy and Secondary…
Archbishop's visit to St Christopher's Hospice
On Friday 9th September, Archbishop Rowan Williams visited St Christopher's Hospice in Sydenham, London.…
Archbishop speaks in House of Lords on unrest
Following the recall of the House of Lords in response to the events of recent days, the Archbishop of…
A Prayer for Peace in Our Communities
The Church of England has published A Prayer for Peace in Our Communities online.
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Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics About Contact
Despite Controversy, Human Studies of CRISPR Move Forward in the US
Researchers in the U.S. have begun editing the genes of adults with devastating diseases, using a tool known as CRISPR. China has already launched multiple trials of CRISPR in humans. Last year Chinese researcher He Jiankui caused a global outcry when he used the same tool to gene edit twin baby girls when they were just embryos. There is far less concern about other CRISPR trials either in the U.S. or China, in part because genetic changes in the adults treated will not be passed on to future generations. “If it’s done well and carefully, I’m not so worried, to be honest,” says Robin Lovell-Badge, a British geneticist and stem cell scientist, regarding the use of CRISPR in these new trials.
Even so, there are lingering questions about whether it is still too early to move ahead with the technology. CRISPR can, at times, inadvertently edit genes that were not intended to be altered. The fear is that such “off-target edits” could cause other health problems, including cancers. Lovell-Badge, a group leader at the Francis Crick Institute in England, says things can always go wrong, but CRISPR has been adequately vetted in laboratory research, and it is a reasonable time to test the tool in adults.
The fact that CRISPR went from an idea in a lab to a trial in people during this decade speaks to the elegance and versatility of the technology,” says Sam Kulkarni, CEO of the company CRISPR Therapeutics, which is in one of two groups testing CRISPR-based gene editing approaches in people.
…continue reading ‘Despite Controversy, Human Studies of CRISPR Move Forward in the US’
Image via Flickr Some rights reserved by National Institutes of Health (NIH)
Tags: bioethics, clinical trial, crispr, gene-editing, oversight, sickle cell, somatic
Bioethics News & Analysis From Johns Hopkins
#BRIDGES
#FoodEthics
#NursingEthics
News roundups
© The Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics. All rights reserved.
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PBS ANNOUNCES THREE NEW PROGRAMS EXPLORING MANY PATHS TO FAITH, SPIRITUALITY
- GOD IN AMERICA, THE BUDDHA and THE CALLING Slated for 2010 -
Pasadena, CA (August 2, 2009) - PBS will present three documentaries that explore faith and the varieties of religious expression in the United States - one of the most religiously observant and spiritually diverse countries in the world. GOD IN AMERICA, THE BUDDHA and THE CALLING will air in 2010 on PBS.
"For many Americans, exploring religion and faith is one of life's biggest and most central questions, and PBS offers some of the most compelling, wide-ranging programming on this subject any where on television," said John F. Wilson, PBS Chief TV Programming Executive. "In 2010, viewers will be able to enhance their understanding from three different documentary perspectives providing a truly multi-dimensional experience that will also continue online with materials and video."
GOD IN AMERICA, a six-hour documentary series from AMERICAN EXPERIENCE and FRONTLINE, targeted to air in fall 2010 on PBS, will tell the sweeping and dramatic story of religious life in America, examining more than 500 years of American religious history from the voyage of Christopher Columbus to the 2008 presidential election. GOD IN AMERICA will examine this history as it has played out in public life, exploring the complex interaction between religion and democracy in the United States; the origins of the American concept of religious liberty; the dynamics of the ever-evolving American religious marketplace; and the vital role played by religious ideas and institutions in many social reform movements in the country's history.
The United States, primarily a Judeo-Christian nation until recently, now encompasses theological groups relatively unknown in the early days of the republic. Buddhism - the world's fourth largest religion after Christianity, Islam and Hinduism - has been steadily gaining adherents in America. THE BUDDHA, a two-hour documentary from Emmy Award winner David Grubin, relates the life of the Indian sage who famously gained enlightenment as he sat beneath a fig tree two-and-a-half millennia ago. This film tells the Buddha's story through painting and sculptures by some of the world's greatest artists and tracks his biography across the sweeping landscapes of northern India. The testimony of contemporary Buddhists, from Pulitzer Prize-winning poet W.S. Merwin to the Dalai Lama, provide insight into the ancient narrative of the man who never claimed to be God or God's emissary, but merely a human being who, in a world of unavoidable pain and suffering, had achieved a serenity that others, too, could find. THE BUDDHA is slated to air in spring 2010 on PBS.
THE CALLING, from independent producer Danny Alpert, The Kindling Group, is a four-hour documentary series that follows eight individuals on their dramatic journey into the clergy from the perspective of different faiths - Islam, Catholicism, Evangelical Christianity and Judaism. A new look at an old job, religious leadership, the series takes viewers into the unknown world of seminaries to tell the compelling stories of young, dynamic and thoughtful subjects, all of whom struggle to balance religious convictions, rigorous academics, personal relationships, dedication to lifelong service - and occasional spells of ambivalence and uncertainty. The resulting portraits provide a rich, nuanced portrayal of faith in America. THE CALLING will air in 2010 (season TBD) on PBS.
PBS, with its 357 member stations, offers all Americans - from every walk of life - the opportunity to explore new ideas and new worlds through television and online content. Each month, PBS reaches more than 115 million people on-air and online, inviting them to experience the worlds of science, history, nature and public affairs; hear diverse viewpoints; and take front row seats to world-class drama and performances. PBS' broad array of programs has been consistently honored by the industry's most coveted award competitions. Teachers of children from pre-K through 12th grade turn to PBS for digital content and services that help bring classroom lessons to life. PBS' premier children's TV programming and Web site, pbskids.org, are parents' and teachers' most trusted partners in inspiring and nurturing curiosity and love of learning in children. More information about PBS is available at www.pbs.org, one of the leading dot-org Web sites on the Internet.
-PBS-
Carrie Johnson, PBS
cjohnson@pbs.org
Michelle Werts, PBS
mjwerts@pbs.org
www.pbs.org/pressroom
DAVID TENNANT REPRISES HIS ROLE AS HAMLET FOR ROYAL SHAKESPEARE ...
PBS KIDS® ANNOUNCES CURIOUS GEORGE COLORING BOOK APP AVAILABLE FOR ...
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Does Gen. Hayden Know What the Fourth Amendment Says?
As part of the Bush administration’s response to the revelations of warrantless domestic spying by the National Security Agency, a former head of the NSA, Gen. Michael Hayden, now the nation’s second-ranking intelligence official, spoke Monday at the National Press Club.
Gen. Hayden disputed a questioner’s statement that the Fourth Amendment requires a showing of “probable cause,” a reference to the need for a judicial warrant, for surveillance. The Amendment only mandates that a search be “reasonable,” Hayden argued. But the Fourth Amendment does in fact also mandate “probable cause.” (For an excerpt of the exchange, see below.)
Hayden said that “if there’s any amendment to the Constitution that employees of the National Security Agency are familiar with, it’s the Fourth.”
Hayden also claimed on electronic surveillance: “I have two paths in front of me, both of them lawful, one FISA, one the presidential — the president’s authorization.” However, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act states that it “shall be the exclusive means by which electronic surveillance … may be conducted.” [FISA; 18 U.S.C. Sec. 2511(f)]
CHRISTOPHER H. PYLE
Professor Pyle is co-author of the book The President, Congress, and the Constitution and author of the book Military Surveillance of Civilian Politics. He said today: “Gen. Hayden says he is bound only by half of the Fourth Amendment — the requirement that searches be reasonable. He ignores the second clause, which requires warrants based on probable cause. He ignores the FISA statute, which requires probable cause and says that judges, not generals, decide when probable cause exists. The general admits that he disregarded the FISA law and the FISA court, which is a felony.” In 1970, Pyle disclosed the U.S. military’s surveillance of civilian politics and worked as a consultant to three Congressional committees, including the Church Committee — which wrote the FISA statute. Pyle is currently a professor of politics at Mount Holyoke College.
Turley is a professor of Constitutional law at George Washington University and has written and practiced in the surveillance and national security areas for many years. He said today: “It was an extraordinary event. Like President Bush, Gen. Hayden stands accused of committing federal criminal acts. His primary defense is that my lawyers told me I could do it. That is hardly a defense. What he did not address was the clear violation of the exclusivity provision of federal law, where it expressly restricts such surveillance to Title III [the federal wiretap law] and FISA. His appearance should reaffirm the need for comprehensive congressional hearings, particularly in the House, as soon as possible.”
Here is a portion of the Hayden transcript; a full transcript is available at the web page of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
For video, do a search on Michael Hayden at C-SPAN’s website.
QUESTION: Jonathan Landay with Knight Ridder. I’d like to stay on the same issue, and that had to do with the standard by which you use to target your wiretaps. I’m no lawyer, but my understanding is that the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution specifies that you must have probable cause to be able to do a search that does not violate an American’s right against unlawful searches and seizures. Do you use —
GEN. HAYDEN: No, actually — the Fourth Amendment actually protects all of us against unreasonable search and seizure.
QUESTION: But the —
GEN. HAYDEN: That’s what it says.
QUESTION: But the measure is probable cause, I believe.
GEN. HAYDEN: The amendment says unreasonable search and seizure.
QUESTION: But does it not say probable —
GEN. HAYDEN: No. The amendment says —
QUESTION: The court standard, the legal standard —
GEN. HAYDEN: — unreasonable search and seizure.
QUESTION: The legal standard is probable cause, General. … I’d like you to respond to this — is that what you’ve actually done is crafted a detour around the FISA court by creating a new standard of “reasonably believe” in place [of] probable cause because the FISA court will not give you a warrant based on reasonable belief, you have to show probable cause. Could you respond to that, please?
GEN. HAYDEN: Sure. I didn’t craft the authorization. I am responding to a lawful order. All right? The attorney general has averred to the lawfulness of the order. Just to be very clear — and believe me, if there’s any amendment to the Constitution that employees of the National Security Agency are familiar with, it’s the Fourth. And it is a reasonableness standard in the Fourth Amendment. And so what you’ve raised to me — and I’m not a lawyer, and don’t want to become one — what you’ve raised to me is, in terms of quoting the Fourth Amendment, is an issue of the Constitution. The constitutional standard is “reasonable.” And we believe — I am convinced that we are lawful because what it is we’re doing is reasonable.
— Fourth Amendment of the Constitution
Behind the Iraq Protests: U.S. and Iran “Partners in Crime”
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Beyond the Rhetoric: Accuracy.org/sc
The Bush administration has repeatedly cited violations of UN Security Council resolutions as key reasons for its policy on Iraq. But several nations have Security Council resolutions pending against them, including Indonesia, Armenia and Croatia. And the violators with the most Security Council resolutions — more than Iraq — are Israel (over 30), Turkey (over 20) and Morocco (over 15). A partial listing of UN Security Council resolutions being violated by U.S. allies is available at: www.Accuracy.org/sc
The following analysts are available for interviews:
Zunes, who wrote the piece “United Nations Security Council Resolutions Currently Being Violated by Countries Other Than Iraq,” said today: “Bush administration claims that it is concerned with the integrity of the United Nations and the enforcement of Security Council resolutions are patently disingenuous. The governments of Morocco, Israel and Turkey are each in violation of more Security Council resolutions than is Iraq. Yet the United States provides these Middle Eastern allies with the financial and military wherewithal to continue their flouting of the Security Council and basic principles of international law.” Zunes is the chair of the Peace and Justice Studies Program at the University of San Francisco, the Middle East editor for the Foreign Policy in Focus Project and author of the recently released book Tinderbox: U.S. Middle East Policy and the Roots of Terrorism.
A fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, Bennis is author of the book Before and After: U.S. Foreign Policy and the September 11th Crisis. She said today: “In 1991 Bush bribed, threatened and punished UN countries to win Security Council authorization to attack Iraq. The real reason had far more to do with assuring the continuation of the U.S. as a superpower even as its superpower competitor was collapsing. U.S. policy for the last 12 years violated the UN Charter itself (through such things as murderous economic sanctions against Iraq) and supported other countries (like Turkey, Morocco, Indonesia and Israel) that continue violating UN resolutions. Now another Bush administration wants to invade Iraq in the name of Security Council resolutions, and wants to use the UN — created to prevent wars — to actually start one.” Bennis wrote the recent article “Veto” about the U.S. government’s repeated use of its veto of resolutions critical of Israel. Over the last three decades, the U.S. has used the veto far more than any other nation.
ERIK LEAVER
Project associate at IPS, Leaver said today: “There are almost 100 current Security Council resolutions that are being violated, in addition to the dozen or so resolutions being violated by Iraq.”
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Bush’s Version of “Corporate Responsibility”
Director of the Campaign for Corporate Reform for the group Citizen Works, Cray said today: “Although it appears there are good things in Bush’s speech, a lot of what he is ‘proposing’ is apparently inevitable considering the momentum in Congress for the Sarbanes bill. Bush could have closed the offshore tax haven loophole which allows CEOs to claim that they are not covered by the new proposals by locating overseas. He could have strengthened whistle-blower protections, he could have barred corporate criminals from getting government contracts. Bush’s SEC budget increase is much less than what is being proposed by the House. He said nothing about the expensing of options on accounting reports, which is critical.”
WENONAH HAUTER, TYSON SLOCUM
Hauter is director of Public Citizen’s energy program; Slocum is research director for the group. They are co-authors of the report “Blind Faith: How Deregulation and Enron’s Influence Looted Billions from Americans.” Public Citizen today called for the Bush administration to name a special counsel to probe the Halliburton firm’s accounting during Dick Cheney’s tenure as CEO. Slocum commented today: “Bush said that self-regulation is not enough, but his speech had a tremendous reliance on voluntary actions…. Bush can say that 95 percent of CEOs are honest, but unfortunately the other 5 percent seem to be controlling most of the U.S. economy.”
MARY ZEPERNICK
Author of the essay “Human vs. Corporate Rights” in the recently released book Defying Corporations, Defining Democracy, Zepernick is co-coordinator of the Program on Corporations, Law and Democracy. She said today: “Corporate scandals and crime are really business as usual. Corporate misbehavior, whether legal or illegal, is not the root of the problem; the fundamental abuse is corporate usurpation of our self-governance. Corporations have acquired the rights of legal personhood: free speech, when workers do not have free speech rights on corporate property; Fourth Amendment protection against search and seizure, which protects corporations against OSHA inspection when it was intended to protect people…. When those who rule feel threatened, they will attempt to co-opt public concern by reforms and rhetoric in order to forestall democratic change.”
KEVIN DANAHER
Editor of Corporations Are Gonna Get Your Mama and co-founder of Global Exchange, Danaher said today: “What the people in power are trying to do is say these are a few bad apples, but what’s wrong is the nature of the system. Corporations have basically taken over the government. They push an ideology of ‘deregulate,’ arguing that if we deregulate a market, then everyone will benefit somehow. CEOs run corporations in such a way that they benefit, while pension funds get depleted, workers get laid off, the citizens get deceived. What’s needed is a separation of corporations and the state, just as there was a separation of church and state….”
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; David Zupan, (541) 484-9167
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SAVE Action PAC co-endorses Sen. Miguel Diaz de la Portilla & Rep. Jose Javier Rodriguez
SAVE Action PAC is proud to co-endorse Senator Miguel Diaz de la Portilla AND Representative Jose Javier Rodriguez! November 8th is election day in Florida's 37th State Senate district in Miami-Dade!
Senator Miguel Diaz de la Portilla has served his constituents admirably and effectively in the Florida Senate. He is slated for a key leadership position in 2017. Unlike a lot of politicians who are long on rhetoric and short on results, Senator Diaz de la Portilla has a proven track record of getting things done in the legislature.
In the 2016 session, Senator Diaz de la Portilla took a bold step by bringing the Florida Competitive Workforce Act up for a vote in his Senate Judiciary Committee for the bill's first vote ever in Florida history. Because of the Senator's strong support for equality and his unwavering actions in the Senate, we are one step closer to comprehensive statewide non-discrimination laws.
Some of our panelists remembered the Senator's vote nearly 20 years ago against the first iteration of Miami-Dade's Human Rights Ordinance when he served as a Miami-Dade County Commissioner in 1997. To this, the Senator responded in the best possible way: "Times were different two decades ago; I made a mistake and I regret it. I have evolved in the last 20 years on LGBTQ issues just like President Obama, President Clinton, and the majority of Americans."
Furthermore, the Senator duly impressed our endorsement panelists with a specific, concrete plan to empower all of the people in Florida, including the burgeoning LGBTQ community. He will prioritize pro-equality policies like the Competitive Workforce Act in 2017 and will be in a key position to get the act passed. We are very proud to co-endorse Senator Miguel Diaz de la Portilla.
Representative Jose Javier Rodriguez currently represents the 112th State House district. As State Representative, Rodriguez has been a strong advocate for policies which promote LGBTQ equality.
The Representative took a lead role in the opposition to the so-called "pastor protection" act by attempting to foil it with an amendment in committee, although the bill in the end became law. He has also advocated for passage of pro-equality policies such as the Florida Competitive Workforce Act, and has spoken out against unpopular proposals to discriminate against LGBTQ Floridians like the anti-trans "bathroom bill."
In his four years in the legislature, Representative Rodriguez has been an advocate for LGBTQ equality, and it showed through in his interview before our endorsement panelists. He has promised to give his LGBTQ constituents a voice in the Legislature by fighting for passage of the Florida Competitive Workforce Act. We are proud to co-endorse Rep. Jose Javier Rodriguez.
YOU DECIDE - a note on Co-Endorsements:
We are always reluctant to Co-Endorse and only do so after excruciatingly careful consideration. This race is very important. You can't vote for both of these candidates, but we certainly want you to vote.
Do your research on both candidates and their position on other issues that are important to you. Use SAVE as your guide on LGBT issues.
The deadline to register to vote in Florida is October 11, 2016! Are you registered to vote? Click here to PRINT and MAIL your new or updated official Florida voter registration. >>
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Atlantipedia
An A-Z Guide To The Search For Plato's Atlantis
I have now published my new book, Joining The Dots, which offers a fresh look at the Atlantis mystery. I have addressed the critical questions of when, where and who, using Plato's own words, tempered with some critical thinking and a modicum of common sense.
Butler, Alan
Voronin, Alexander
Andrew Dalby
Homer (c. 8th cent. BC) is generally accepted as the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, regarded as the two greatest epic poems of ancient Greece. A recent study of the Greek used by Homer has enabled scientists from the University of Reading to confirm that the language used is compatible with that used in the 8th century BC, in fact dating it to around 762 BC(i).
It should also be noted that over 130 quotations from the Illiad and Odyssey have been identified in Plato’s writings(s). George Edwin Howes (1865-1942), an American classicist, produced a dissertation[1458] on Homeric quotations in Plato and Aristotle.
Almost nothing is known of his life. He has been variously described as mad, blind and even mythical. Andrew Dalby, the English linguist, has gone so far as to claim[0591] that the author of the two famed epics was in fact a woman! While in 1897 Samuel Butler, the novelist, was even more specific when he proposed that Homer was a Sicilian woman(j).
For centuries it was assumed that the content of these Homeric poems was the product of his imagination, just as the historical reality of Homer himself has been questioned. In 1795, F.A. Wolf, a German academic declared that ‘Homer’ was in fact a collective name applied to various poets whose works were finally combined into their present form in the 6th century BC. Wolf’s ideas sparked furious argument among Greek scholars that still resonates today. Now (2015), historian, Adam Nicholson has claimed that the author ‘Homer’ should not be thought of as a person but instead as a ‘culture’(o).
The identification of the site at Hissarlik in modern Turkey as Troy by Heinrich Schliemann led to a complete re-appraisal of Homer’s work and, of course, further controversy. Homer’s Iliad is the story of the Trojan War and it has been suggested that in fact he had compressed three or more Trojan wars into one narrative. What is not generally known is that there are also ancient non-Homeric accounts of the Trojan War(q).
Kenneth Wood and his wife Florence have built on the research of his mother-in-law, the late Edna Leigh, and produced, Homer’s Secret Iliad[391], a book that attempts to prove that the Iliad was written as an aide memoire for a wide range of astronomical data.
Allied to, but not directly comparable with, is the astronomical information identified in the Bible by the likes of E. W. Maunder (1851-1928)[1137].
Guy Gervis has adopted some of their work and specifies a date of around 2300 BC for the events described in the Iliad and Odyssey, based on an analysis of this astronomical data(n). Harald A.T. Reiche held similar views which followed some of the ideas expressed in Hamlet’s Mill[0524] by Santillana & Dechend who were colleagues of Reiche at M.I.T. They also claimed that “myths were vehicles for memorising and transmitting certain kinds of astronomical and cosmological information.”
*Much has been written about the historicity of Homer’s epic accounts, including a good overview on Wikipedia(ab). Many have concluded that Homer did use real events, even if they were frequently dressed in mythological clothing compatible with the literary conventions of his day. I consider Plato to have treated the story of Atlantis in a similar manner.*
A recent study of solar eclipses recorded in Odyssey using data from NASA has apparently confirmed that Odysseus returned to Ithaca on 25th of October 1207 BC(r).
Scholars have generally supported the idea that Homer’s works have a Mediterranean backdrop with regular attempts to reconcile his geography with modern locations, such as the claim in 2005 by Robert Brittlestone, a British investigator to have located the site of Ithaca, the homeland of Odysseus, on the Greek island of Cephalonia. This popular idea should be put alongside the views of Zlatko Mandzuka who maintains[1396] that all the locations mentioned in the Odyssey can be identified in the Adriatic.
Nevertheless, there has been a growing body of opinion that insists that this Mediterranean identification is impossible. A range of alternative regions has been proposed(f) as the setting for the epics, which extend from Portugal as far northward as the Baltic.
In his Odyssey (VII: 80), Homer wrote about the island of Scheria in the western sea. His description of the island has been compared with Plato’s description of Atlantis and has led to the theory that they refer to the same place. There is little doubt that both the detailed geography and climatic descriptions given by Homer cannot be reconciled with that of the Mediterranean. Consequently, the Odyssey has had many interpretations, ranging from Tim Severin’s conclusion[392] that it refers entirely to the Eastern Mediterranean to Iman Wilkens’ book, Where Troy Once Stood[610], that has the voyage include the west coast of Africa, then across to the West Indies and following the Gulf Stream returns to Troy which he locates in Britain. Location is not a problem exclusive to the writings of Plato. Wilkins views are a reflection of similar ideas expressed by Théophile Cailleux[393] in the 19th century. Gilbert Pillot has also argued for voyages of Ulysses having taken him into the North Atlantic[742]. In 1973, Ernst Gideon (? – 1975) wrote in a similar vein in Homerus Zanger der Kelten, reprinted later as Troje Lag in Engelan[1643].
An interesting overview of the various attempts to transfer the Odyssey from the Mediterranean to Northern Europe is available(w).* Damien Mackey has also endorsed the idea of a Northern European backdrop to Homer’s Odyssey(aa).*
Another researcher who places all of Odysseus’ travels in the eastern Atlantic is Gerard. W.J. Janssen of Leiden University on the academia.edu website(v).
E.J. de Meester also argues for the British Isles as the location of many of Homer’s references. It struck me as quite remarkable that the level of debate regarding the date, source and geographical details of Homer’s works is rather similar to the controversy surrounding Plato’s Atlantis in Timaeus and Critias. The late Edo Nyland was another researcher who had also opted for a Scottish backdrop to the Odyssey and had recently published his views[394].
Felice Vinci also supports[019] a Northern European background to the Iliad and Odyssey. However, in Vinci’s case, Scandinavia, and in particular the Baltic Sea, is identified as the location for the adventures in Homer’s classics. An English language synopsis of his book is available on the Internet. The persuasiveness of Vinci’s argument has recently renewed interest in the idea of a Baltic Atlantis. The assumption being that if Troy could be located in the Baltic, so might Atlantis. Vinci’s views are comparable with those of J. Rendel Harris expressed in a lecture delivered in 1924(p) in which he claims that “we are entitled to take Homer and his Odysseus out of the Mediterranean or the Black Sea, and to allow them excursions into Northern latitudes.”
However, a scathing review of Vinci’s book can be found on the Internet(d) and in issue 216 (2006) of Fortean Times written by Marinus Anthony van der Sluijs.
Further support for a Northern European Troy has come from the historian Edward Furlong, a former naval navigation officer, who has advocated for over twenty years that the journey of Odysseus went as far north as Norway. His particular views are outlined on the Internet(c) .
Other writers, such as the late Henrietta Mertz [0396/7], , have suggested that Homer’s epic refers to a trip to North America. Professor Enrico Mattievich Kucich of Lima University is also certain that the ancient Greeks discovered America America[400]. However revolutionary this idea may seem it shows how this particular subject is growing and would probably justify a reference book of its own.
The idea of an Atlantic backdrop to the Homeric epics will not go away. The Dutch researcher, N.R. De Graaf, continues to write extensively on his Homeros Explorations website(x) regarding many of the specifics in Homer’s accounts.
In 1973 James Bailey proposed in his well-received The God-Kings and the Titans[149] that the Odysseus recorded a trans-Atlantic trip. Evidence exists for large-scale mining in the Americas as early of the 5th millennium BC. Bailey maintained that the Europeans imported enormous quantities of copper and tin from Central and South America to feed the demands of the Old World Bronze Age, an idea that was later heavily promoted by Frank Joseph and in great, if overly speculative, detail by Reinoud de Jong(y).
Finally, the Atlantis connection with this entry is that if, as now appears to be at least a possibility, Homer’s Odyssey was about a journey to the North Sea then the possibility of a North Sea setting for the Atlantis story is somewhat reinforced.
A recent book[395] by Steven Sora has developed the Atlantic notion further with the suggestion that not only was Troy located outside the Strait of Gibraltar but that both Homer’s Trojan war and Plato’s Atlantean war are two versions of the same war with the understandable distortions and embellishments that can occur with a narrative, probably involving some degree of oral transmission and then written down hundreds of years after the events concerned.
Ukraine is soon to be added to the growing list of alternative locations for the setting of Homer’s epics with the publication of Homer, The Immanent Biography, a book by A.I. Zolotukhin(g). He claims that Homer was born in Alibant (Mykolayiv, Ukraine) on September 14, 657 BC(t). He follows the views of Karl Ernst von Baer (1792-1876) who believed that most of Odysseus’s travels took place in the Black Sea rather than the Mediterranean. Additionally, he locates Atlantis in the western Crimean area of Evpatoria(l). His 60-page book is available on his website(m).
An interesting paper(e) by the German historian, Armin Wolf, relates how his research over 40 years unearthed 80 theories on the geography of the Odyssey, of which around 30 were accompanied by maps. One of the earliest maps of the travels of Odysseus was produced by Abraham Ortelius in 1597(u) , in which the adventures of Odysseus all take place within the Central and Eastern Mediterranean, arguably reflecting the maritime limits of Greek experience at the time of Homer’s sources!*Another website(z) by Jonathan S. Burgess, Professor of Classics at the University of Toronto offers further information on this, including some informative bibliographical material.*
In 2009, Wolf published, Homers Reise: Auf den Spuren des Odysseus[669] a German language book that expands on the subject, also locating all the travels of Odysseus within Central and Eastern Mediterranean.
Wolf’s ideas were enthusiastically adopted by Wolfgang Geisthövel in his Homer’s Mediterranean[1578], who also concurs with the opinion of J.V. Luce [1579], who proposed that Homer was “describing fictional events against authentic backgrounds.” This would be comparable to a James Bond movie, which has an invented storyline set in actual exotic locations around the world.
Perhaps the most radical suggestion has come from the Italian writer, Michele Manher, who has proposed(h) that Homer’s Iliad originated in India where elements of it can be identified in the Mahabharata!
In August 2015, a fifteen hour reading of the Iliad was performed in London.
(c) https://www.academia.edu/8167048/WHERE_DID_ODYSSEUS_GO_
(d) http://mythopedia.info/Vinci-review.pdf
(e) http://www.ine-notebooks.org/index.php/te/article/viewPDFInterstitial/119/175
(f) http://codexceltica.blogspot.com/search?q=atlantis
(g) http://pushkinclub.homerandatlantis.com/english/homer.html
(h) http://www.migration-diffusion.info/article.php?id=100
(i) http://www.insidescience.org/content/geneticists-estimate-publication-date-iliad/946
(j) http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/aoto/
(k) https://web.archive.org/web/20180320072706/http://www.nwepexplore.com (see ‘n’)
(l) http://homerandatlantis.com/?lang=en
(m) http://homerandatlantis.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Homer_The_Immanent_biography_pdf2.pdf
(n) https://web.archive.org/web/20180320072706/http://www.nwepexplore.com
(o) http://www.newser.com/story/200859/homer-wasnt-a-person-historian.html
(p) https://www.escholar.manchester.ac.uk/api/datastream?publicationPid=uk-ac-man-scw:1m1163&datastreamId=POST-PEER-REVIEW-PUBLISHERS-DOCUMENT.PDF
(q) https://luwianstudies.org/the-homeric-epics/
(r) http://www.historydisclosure.com/scientists-provide-evidence-that-homers-odyssey-is-not-fiction/
(s) http://plato-dialogues.org/tools/char/homerqot.htm
(t) http://homerandatlantis.com/?p=4938&lang=en
(u) https://kottke.org/19/03/mapping-the-odyssey-isnt-easy
(v) https://www.academia.edu/38535990/ATLANTIC_OGUGIA_AND_KALUPSO?email_work_card=view-paper
(w) https://codexceltica.blogspot.com/2009/10/homers-north-atlantic-odyssey.html
(x) http://www.homeros-explorations.nl/
(y) https://www.academia.edu/3894415/COPPER_AND_TIN_FROM_AMERICA_c.2500-1200_BC_
*(z) http://wakeofodysseus.com/
(aa) https://historyancientphilsophy.wordpress.com/2019/10/27/more-to-the-iliad-and-the-odyssey-than-meets-the-eye/ {3896}
(ab) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_the_Homeric_epics#History*
Tagged A.I. Zolotukhin, Abraham Ortelius, Adam Nicholson, Andrew Dalby, Armin Wolf, Atlantis, Baltic, Black Sea, Britain, Cephalonia, copper, E. J. de Meester, E. W. Maunder, Edna Leigh, Edo Nyland, Enrico Mattievich Kucich, Ernst Gideon, F.A. Wolf, Felice Vinci, Frank Joseph, George Edwin Howes, Gerard. W.J. Janssen, Gilbert Pillot, Gulf Stream, Guy Gervis, Hamlet's Mill, Harald A. T. Reiche, Heinrich Schliemann, Henriette Mertz, Homer, Illiad, Iman Wilkens, Ithaca, J.RndelHarris, J.V. Luce, James Bailey, Jonathan S. Burgess, Karl Ernst von Baer, Kenneth & Florence Wood, M.I.T., Mahabharata, Marinus Anthony van der Sluijs, Michele Manher, N. R. DeGraaf, North Sea, Odyssey, Reinoud de Jonge, Robert Brittlestone, Samuel Butler, Santillana & Dechend, Scheria, Solar Eclipses, Steven Sora, Strait of Gibraltar, Théophile Cailleux, Tim Severin, Trojan War, Troy, Turkey, Ukraine, Wolfgang Geisthövel, Zlatko Mandzuka
Copyright © Tony O'Connell
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Category: Guest Relationship
Total 14 Posts
Is Guest Experience the future of hotel marketing?
Tony LOEB -- May 5, 2017 --
Is the guest experience the future of hotel distribution? Martin Soler, a friend and close collaborator, recently told me about an article which had generated quite a storm and lead to some polemical discussion in the hotel world: https://www.tnooz.com/article/give-distribution-to-otas-focus-on-guest-experience/ In the article, David Turnbull (co-founder of the SnapShot company) states: “If I was starting a hotel from scratch, I’d give all…
What does the future hold for guest-hotel relationships?
Tony LOEB -- March 16, 2017 --
More and more, we hear people talking about “guest relations,” “following the customer journey,” “Big Data,” “CRM,” and so on. But what do all of these concepts mean and how should you respond? Do independent hoteliers necessarily need to address these subjects specifically? Is there a risk, however remote, for those who don’t do so? Today, it appears obvious that…
An analysis of the ten best hotels in the world
A long time ago, when I was still a teenager, I learned to play a number of different musical instruments. At the time, one of my teachers told me about a technique used by many artists who wanted to improve: to find a role model or a mentor and allow themselves to be inspired. The idea was as follows: rather…
The top eight sources of satisfaction and dissatisfaction
Tony LOEB -- May 22, 2016 --
The world of hotels and their communications systems continues to evolve. It is becoming extremely difficult to overlook new trends and tools while, in view of recent developments, TripAdvisor has announced that it will improve its systems for detecting fake reviews. As for Booking.com, it is now the most important online platform for guest reviews. No matter what, you need…
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Concerts, Sports & Other Events
Mumford & Sons Announce North American Tour Dates
Mumford & Sons has just announced dates for their 2015 North American Tour in support of their upcoming album, Wilder Mind. Mumford & Sons will kick off their tour July 2nd at MCU Park in New York and wrap up their tour at Scotiabank Saddledome in Calgary, Canada.
Mumford & Sons will also be playing several festivals this summer including Bonnaroo, Squamish Music Festival, Outside Lands Festival and Gentlemen of the Road in as well as Leeds Festival in the U.K.
Additional tour dates are expected to be announced shortly. Tickets to see Mumford & Sons on their North American tour can be purchased online or by phone.
Category: Concert Tour Ticket Sales
Seinfeld’s Jason Alexander to Join Cast of Fish in The Dark
Jason Alexander forever known as Jerry’s friend George Castanza of NBC’s classic sitcom Seinfeld is set to join the cast of Broadway’s hottest sold-out show, Fish in The Dark.
Larry David who wrote and stars in Fish in the Dark, is the creator of Seinfeld and HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm. Larry has taken his first adventure on Broadway with this new theatre production and has yet again achieved smashing success. On June 7, Alexander will take the reigns and replace Larry David’s dysfunctional character Norman Drexel.
“I have enjoyed it, but as my mother used to say, ‘Enough is enough.'” David said, explaining his reasons for bowing out of the acting role. “I am sure the cast will be relieved to be working with a professional” David joked.
Jason Alexander is actually not a stranger to Broadway, and has even taken home a Tony award for Best Leading Actor in a Musical from his work in Jerome Robbins’ Broadway.
Alexander joins a cast that includes Jerry Adler, Rosie Perez, Jake Cannavalle, Jayne Houdyshell and Jonny Orsini. Fish in the Dark is scheduled to run Through July 19 at The Cort Theatre.
Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour Announces 2016 Tour
Wilco Cancels Indianapolis Concert in Response to the RFRA
Madonna to Kick Off Worldwide Tour in August
My Box Office Tickets Privacy Policy
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Colorado Shooter: Insane or Just Plain Evil?
Defense attorneys for the man accused of killing 12 people in a packed movie theater will likely present an insanity defense. But proving it won’t be easy.
Eliza Shapiro
Christine Pelisek
Updated Jul. 13, 2017 9:33PM ET / Published Jul. 25, 2012 4:45AM ET
RJ Sangosti, Pool / AP Photo
Around 9:30 a.m. on Monday, a shackled James Holmes was ushered by deputies into the courtroom of Arapahoe Superior Court Judge William Sylvester. His hair dyed orange, his eyes glassy, the man accused of murdering 12 people in a Colorado movie theater sat about 20 feet from the victims’ family members. During the 10-minute court proceeding, Holmes looked at times like he was in a catatonic state. When Judge Sylvester asked if he understood the charges being brought against him, he sat silent while his public defender Daniel King answered for him.
Holmes’s bizarre behavior quickly raised questions about whether the 24-year-old was truly insane or was just acting the part. At a press conference outside the court building, 18th Judicial District Attorney Carol Chambers said the death penalty could be a possibility for Holmes, whose bloody rampage at the Century 16 theater on July 20 has dominated headlines and left this quiet city reeling. A decision about the death penalty “is months down the line,” said Chambers. Legal experts say Holmes’s public defenders, King and Tamara Brady, will most likely present an insanity defense. Kind and Brady couldn’t be reached for comment.
Insane or not, Holmes will most likely never see the light of day again. “This isn’t a whodunit case,” said Professor Louis Schlesinger, an expert in psychology and mass violence at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
Even before a court determines whether Holmes is insane, it must decide if he is competent to stand trial. In all likelihood, say experts, the answer will be yes. “The threshold for a person to be incompetent is that the person has to be unaware of the nature of the legal proceedings,” said Mimi Wesson, a law professor at the University of Colorado–Boulder who says defendants are rarely deemed incompetent. This means the person “doesn’t understand that he’s been charged with a crime and is unable to assist his lawyers. He can’t talk to them, communicate to them, can’t remember anything, and is extremely out of contact with reality.”
Meanwhile, Holmes’s defense team will likely have him examined by a state-appointed expert to determine if he is insane. That would include establishing a history of psychosis or extreme mental illness.
“The standard is very high,” for proving insanity in Colorado, said Barry Latzer, a professor of government at John Jay. “You have to show not only that he was psychotic but that at the time of the crime, as a result of the psychosis, he literally didn’t know what he was doing was morally or legally proper. It’s going to be hard to find that he didn’t know what he was doing.”
Jared Loughner mounted an insanity defense after he killed six people and injured 14 others, including U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords at a Tucson, Ariz., shopping center in January 2011. But questions were raised after police found he surfed the Web about execution by lethal injection, conditions of solitary confinement, and past assassins before he went on his rampage. There was also evidence that he stalked Giffords before shooting her. Loughner pleaded not guilty and is awaiting a hearing to determine if he’s fit to stand trial.
Holmes, who had been enrolled in a neuroscience doctoral program, allegedly spent four months building up an arsenal of guns and ammunition before he went on his killing spree. Before he arrived at the theater, he booby-trapped his apartment with trip wires and IEDs. He also reportedly applied for a membership with at least one shooting range. Prior to the shooting, Holmes allegedly posted a profile on the website Adult Friend Finder profile asking would-be suitors, “Will you visit me in jail?”
If the defense can prove that Holmes was insane at the time of the shooting, the death penalty would be taken off the table. That could be a difficult task given the prosecutorial prowess of Chambers, a successful prosecutor whose office is responsible for the convictions of two of the three people on Colorado’s death row.
Chambers will be pitted against Tamara Brady, a veteran public defender. In 2006, she represented Jose Luis Rubi-Nava, who was accused of killing his girfriend by dragging her behind a car with a tow strap. Rubi-Nava avoided the death penalty by pleading guilty and was sentenced to life in prison.
If Holmes makes it to trial he will be one of the few mass murderers in recent years to do so. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who killed 15 of their classmates at Columbine High School in 1999, and Seung-Hui Cho, who shot and killed 32 people at Virginia Tech, all committed suicide immediately after their shooting rampages.
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See Also: Previous Year (1993) | Next Year (1995)
Bishop Events (975): January to February | March to April | May to June | July to August | September to October | November to December
Necrology (138)
Diocese Events (111)
Consistory:
Ordained Priest 29.6 88 4 2 2 7 15 19 10 6 2 3 5 11 2
Ordained Bishop 52.2 143 22 10 17 13 16 8 12 9 16 11 3 6 0
Deaths 78.1 138 7 13 18 7 12 17 5 15 8 11 12 12 1
Ordained Priest:
Most Common Date: (5)
Most Common Ordainer: (3)
Joseph Louis Cardinal Bernardin †, Archbishop of Chicago, Illinois, USA
Ordained Bishop:
Most Common Date: (15)
Most Common Principal Consecrator: (13)
Pope John Paul II (St. Karol Józef Wojtyła †)
Most Common Principal Co-Consecrator: (14)
Archbishop Giuseppe (Josip) Uhac †, Titular Archbishop of Tharros
Code: web_e, v3.2.2, 5 Oct 2019; Data: 16 Jan 2020
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Support struggling families, synod’s lay observers say
Anthony and Catherine Wally Witczak (at center in blue), from Philadelphia, and other delegates leave a session of the Synod of Bishops on the family at the Vatican Oct. 15. The couple are observers at the synod. (CNS photo/Paul Haring)
By Junno Arocho Esteves • Catholic News Service • Posted October 16, 2015
VATICAN CITY (CNS) — Couples attending the Synod of Bishops called for empathy and support from the church to families suffering difficult circumstances.
Several lay couples and a missionary sister addressed the synod Oct. 15-16, highlighting various issues facing families in their countries and abroad.
Anthony and Catherine Witczak, the international ecclesial team of the Worldwide Marriage Encounter, stressed the need for better programs for engaged and married couples in the church. They also said couples should not be separated when taking part in parish ministry, “but rather let their sacrament shine by allowing them to work as a team.”
Anthony Witczak also called for a priestly formation that is geared to living a closer relationship with families in their parishes.
“If a church is meant to be a family of families, then we should encourage our seminarians to be priests in love with their people, not merely priests in charge of a parish,” he said. “Our faith is based on relationship with God, but it is learned and lived out in relationship with others.”
(See a related story on the Witczaks.)
The president of Parents Centres New Zealand, Sharron Cole, said that while the church’s teaching on conjugal love and responsible parenthood in “Humanae Vitae” has “great beauty and depth,” couples who struggle with either low-income, mental health problems or other difficulties find it hard to abide by those tenets.
“As an ex-board member of Natural Family Planning, I know that this method of contraception permitted by ‘Humanae Vitae’ is an effective method for motivated couples,” she said.
“Every family has difficulties which might lead them for a period of time to use artificial contraception in the interests of responsible parenting. Marriage naturally leads to a desire for children, which is a biological imperative and a great grace of the sacrament. In my experience, very few couples suppress this desire, with its constraints tending to be the couple’s resources to cope, not selfishness.”
Cole called on the church to listen “with deep empathy” to laypeople and to “re-examine its teaching on marriage and sexuality, and its understanding of responsible parenthood, in a dialogue of laity and bishops together.”
Moira McQueen, director of the Canadian Catholic Bioethics Institute, noted that elderly people are seldom mentioned in the synod’s working document.
“This perhaps reflects what the elderly report: They are not seen as important; society tends to ignore them; they do not seem to matter,” she said.
McQueen said that while the elderly not only deserve proper medical care, they also deserve spiritual programs that help them in the final states of life.
“Pope John Paul II urged people to ‘live life to its end,’ and we can help elderly people do that by looking after their physical and spiritual welfare, protecting them from hastened death, and giving them reason to maintain their sense of purpose in life as long as possible,” she said.
Dr. Anca-Maria Cernea, a Romanian and president of the Catholic Doctors Association of Bucharest, warned of a “cultural Marxism” that imposes gay rights, gender ideology and attempts to redefine family, sexual identity and human nature.
“This ideology calls itself progressive. But it is nothing else than the ancient serpent’s offer, for man to take control, to replace God, to arrange salvation here, in this world,” she said.
The church, she added, is called to protect the faithful from these dangers through evangelization and conversion.
“The church’s mission is to save souls. Evil, in this world, comes from sin,” she said, “not from income disparity or ‘climate change.'”
Sister Carmen Sammut, a member of the Missionary Sisters of Our Lady of Africa and president of the International Union of Superiors General, urged the Synod of Bishops to allow for more collaboration between the laity and the hierarchy.
“If the image of church is the people of God, then we, the laity, would be expected to bring our knowledge to the discernment processes of the church, in view of decision-making, always in union with the pope and our bishops,” she said.
She suggested that couples, as well as religious, can help in the formation of priests and ordained ministers.
“I really dream of a church where each one is called to give his or her part for the construction of the whole,” she said.
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An Ecumenical and Inclusive Fellowship of the United Methodist Church
Church Campus
Church Ministries
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Spiritual Life and Worship
•At the risk of stating the obvious, we’re Christians.
•There are 8 million of us in the United States and another 3.5 million in countries around the world. You can help that number grow.
•Our congregations are deeply involved in their own communities and in outreach far from home.
•Both women and men are our clergy/pastors. We believe we are all in ministry together. Our decision-making bodies always include clergy and lay church members.
•We have two sacraments – baptism and communion – and our communion table is open to all. (Yes, that really means everyone.)
•We believe that many of the things that separate people from each other are more important to them than they are to God.
•Our name, Methodist, at first was a term meant to poke fun at our theological founder, John Wesley. (He’s an interesting character, and you’ll learn more about him if you keep asking questions.)
•We hope you’ll do exactly that – keep asking questions about United Methodism and about how you can grow spiritually and do good works in God’s name.
Where Did It All Begin?
Remember the “Do-Re-Me” song in “The Sound of Music”? Maria is teaching the Von Trapp kids to sing and advises them, “Let's start at the very beginning, a very good place to start.”
Since United Methodism is Christian, that means we start with Judaism about 2,000 years ago. Register these basic points as you explore:
•Jesus of Nazareth, a Jew, was born in what we now call the Middle East between 7 and 2 B.C.E. (Before the Common Era). (Note: You probably recognize years “B.C.” and “A.D.,” but scholars now refer to years “Before the Common Era” and in the “Common Era.” Jesus’ time is the dividing line.)
•The human Jesus walked around ancient Israel preaching, teaching, healing and causing great consternation to the power structure.
•He invited everyone (that means women and children, too, in a male-dominated culture) to participate in the coming kingdom of God.
•He welcomed the social rejects and big sinners of his day.
•His challenge of the power structure led to his arrest by religious authorities – after his closest friends betrayed and abandoned him.
•Roman authorities crucified him (a horrible, but common, execution method) as a criminal sometime between 26-36 C.E.
•He forgave his enemies with his dying breath.
•After burial, he rose from the dead and appeared multiple times to his followers.
The Peculiar Idea of Trinity
To continue this story of how Christianity evolved – and how United Methodism entered the picture – you have to start grappling with the idea of the Trinity, a belief shared with other Christians.
The concept of the Trinity is that there is one God who is revealed to us in three forms:
•God, the loving father and creator of the universe
•Jesus Christ, God’s son and our redeemer, who was fully human and fully divine
•The Holy Spirit, God actually with us, awakening us to God’s will and helping us carry it out
The trick is that all three exist simultaneously. Don’t worry if it is hard to grasp. There are scholars who have made careers of trying to figure it out.
The Idea of Church Takes Root
The early Christian Church began when the Holy Spirit descended on the frightened followers of Jesus – men and women who had just seen their leader, teacher and healer brutally killed.
They had experienced God in the form of the human Jesus and now were experiencing God as the Holy Spirit.
There is much to the story of how Christianity took root, but here are some basic points on the timeline:
•The early apostles spread the “Good News” (a term you’ll hear often) throughout their world, baptizing others in the name of Jesus, breaking bread, sharing wine and building community.
•The story spread by word of mouth, and it wasn’t until perhaps 80 to 100 years after Jesus died that people starting recording the literature that has become the Bible.
•In the first century C.E., Christianity was an underground movement – persecuted by Jews and outlawed by the Roman Empire.
•Things started changing in 318 C.E. That’s when Roman Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity. Churches were organized across the Roman Empire, with bishops over cities and geographic areas.
•Between 440-461 C.E., the bishop of Rome claimed authority over the Catholic Christian Church. (“Catholic” in this sense meant universal or worldwide.) He took the title of Pope Leo I.
You’ve probably heard of Protestants, but what were the original Protestants protesting? The answer is that they had many bones to pick with the operation of the Catholic Church.
•It began in 1517 with Martin Luther, a German priest/theologian.
•Other reformers in various European countries followed. They took somewhat different paths, and here are some of their issues:
•Correcting questionable practices of the church
•Challenging the authority of the pope
•Establishing the Bible as the only diving source of knowledge
•Making religion more accessible to ordinary people (for instance, replacing Latin in church and having Bibles in the languages of the people)
•Allowing priests (soon known as ministers) to marry
This Protestant Reformation ultimately led to Lutherans, Baptists, Huguenouts, Presbyterians and other denominations.
The Reformation Moves to England . . . and then America
Martin Luther emboldened many people, including King Henry VIII, who broke with the Roman Catholic Church (a great tale of marital and political intrigue, but that’s another story) to form the Church of England, also known as the Anglican Church or the Episcopal Church. That was in the 1530s.
Skip ahead two centuries, and we’re finally ready to meet the Methodists.
•In 1729, brothers John and Charles Wesley, who were Anglican priests, joined others from Oxford College in England in a religious study group, literally the “Holy Club.”
•Members were so methodical in their practices, that outsiders mockingly called them “Methodists,” proving that taunts and bullying aren’t anything new.
•You can thank the American Revolution for United Methodism.
•When the revolution began, Anglican clergymen abandoned 15,000 church members in the colonies.
•Since the Bishop of London wouldn’t send clergy to the rebellious colonies, John Wesley ordained ministers on his own authority. (“Take that!” he may have said, but in a more formal 18th Century British manner as he channeled Martin Luther.)
•The Methodist Episcopal Church in America was established in 1784. (Lots of twists and turns over the next two centuries led us to today’s United Methodist Church, but explaining them is best left for another day.)
Some real basics about The United Methodist Church
Who can be baptized? People of any age, from infancy through adulthood, but once is sufficient because it is God’s act, not a denomination’s. (If you were baptized in another faith and later join a United Methodist church, you can “confirm” or “reaffirm” that baptism, but God got it right the first time.)
How is baptism done? Ordinary water and the hands of a minister are the tools. (Most people get sprinkled, but some prefer pouring or immersion – so, yes, you can get dunked.)
Just what is it? Communion is an act of worship that uses bread and wine (unfermented grape juice, actually) to open ourselves to God’s love, to remember Christ’s life and to be bound to a bigger community.
Who is it for? United Methodists have an “open table.” It’s not “our” table, but the family table to which Jesus welcomed everyone and a sacred time of inclusion. (You don’t have to be a member. You don’t have to be baptized. You don’t have to be an adult. It really is open to all.)
United Methodist pastors can be women or men, single or married.
All are screened rigorously (background checks, psychological testing, the works). Ordination comes after years of full-time ministry. A church may have one or more ordained ministers or a person who is licensed for ministry. Church staff may also include others who are schooled in music, Christian education, youth ministry and other disciplines.
Joining the celebration in today’s world
A Sunday morning worship service is everyone’s initial concept of being part of a church. Indeed, Sunday service is a fixture, but John Wesley himself would tell you that worship happens every day – and in many ways.
Today’s United Methodists are “rethinking church” and affirming to everyone that a church has many doors – literal and figurative. Church might include:
•A daycare program
•A youth basketball league
•A Bible study class
•A “Habitat for Humanity” build team
•A choir
•A mentoring program for at-risk teens
•A soup kitchen for the hungry
•A food bank
•A fund-raising project to end malaria
•A wintertime homeless shelter
•Any of thousands of ways people connect with others through the church
A basic concept is that Christianity is not practiced alone but in a community of believers who understand that “love” and “church” are both verbs. Jesus reminded the people of his time that the two great rules of life were to love God and to love your neighbor as yourself. That’s good advice to live by today.
Poke your head in one of our many doors to find ways to do both things.
And now, a word from John Wesley
If nothing else, John Wesley was a never-give-up kind of guy. He believed all of us should:
“Do all the good you can . . .
in all the ways you can . . .
in all the places you can . . .
to all the people you can . . .
as long as ever you can.”
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Christianity Kept Simple
Is It Harassment?
In the Webster’s Dictionary there are general definitions for harassment. It is a derivative of the root word harass. Harass is a verb that in some cases means to annoy. It can also be defined as to exhaust or to fatigue. But in the case of harassment it is frequently used to mean the act of annoying or being annoyed. It is a commonly used word and almost everyone alive today believes that they have been harassed by or have harassed someone else. Many of us have been guilty of both. Harassment can vary in degree of intensity and identifying harassment may vary from one time to all the time. It is subject to individual interpretation.
In 1964, the Civil Rights Act was enacted by Congress and became law. In 1965 the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission followed. In this government organization the law prohibiting harassment was defined. Click here to access the federal governments broad definition of Harassment. The government, at that time, began dealing with complaints about harassment at all levels of society including within the government. Penalties for harassment were enacted and for several years after that it appeared that the government actions were effective. Nonetheless, two and a half generations later, once again, our society is on the brink of a new crisis involving harassment.
But what circumstances brought about the heightened awareness of harassment and why are people, especially women, coming forth with complaints about sexual harassment? The answers up to this point are unclear. Some believe that increased awareness of the laws caused people who previously feared coming forward, to reopen old wounds. Deep, long suppressed feelings of anger have found an outlet kept hidden for long periods of time. Like a spark in a dry forest, a conflagration of emotion has erupted among victims. The spark that lighted the firestorm was a well known mogul in the entertainment industry. After the thorough admonishment of this mogel, many other names of prominent men began to appear almost daily in the media. Now there is a long list of accused predators with their necks on the guillotine.
Another question on the minds of many people is, why almost overnight, are women and men coming forward so many years later? There have been explanations of this phenomena. Reasons like, I was afraid no one would believe me, or I just wanted it to stop. But it appears that the root cause was ignited during the Presidential campaign. The prevailing image was that the current President of the United States is a predator. Being elected without any consequences triggered an outrage among women in this country. It is likely that this lack of action inflamed victims and motivated them to come forth. Once people began to speak out the liberal media wasted no time fanning the flame.
Daily now, it is sure that most Americans peruse the morning news to see who will be accused today. The accusations will die out in time. However, with the advent of multiple gender identities, recognizing what is harassment and what is not will have an enormous effect on society. There will be changes in how we act with one another and in our laws. This along with all the other changes in our society will bring about a world alien to all of us alive today.
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Posting Since March 2014
See future posts
Contact me at thomasmcnally@outlook.com
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First Impressions of Windows 8
Note: This is the first in a series of posts on Windows 8 and my impressions of the new OS and what it will mean for the average user. Considering the furor among users and the controversy that has attached to this newest revised OS from Microsoft, the subject just begs to be covered, and here we are! It may interest you to know that this post was created on a notebook running Windows 8.
I. On Solid Ground with Windows 8
My first exposure to Windows 8 was at an official event, hosted by Microsoft, in which the entire point was to introduce the assembled agents of the Fourth Estate to their newest OS. The approach that was used and the content of the briefing made it clear that the event was more than simply an opportunity for the news media to get a look-see at the new OS, it was carefully structured and produced as an indoctrination experience -- the host did not merely wish to expose us to the new OS, they wanted us to leave the briefing holding a specific view of the Operating System.
It should not surprise you to learn that I don't like it when PR's attempt to manage us, and I especially do not like it when they work so hard to slant our impressions of the product that they are showing us in such a way so as to guarantee that we will form a specific impression. To say that this is not how the briefing process is supposed to work is gross understatement, and under normal circumstances a company like Microsoft would never attempt such a thing, but as you will soon see, these were not normal circumstances.
It was quickly clear that their big concern was largely the manner in which we would, as a group and individually, perceive the new interface and how it will impact the users. It was important to the hosts to see to it that we had ample opportunity to form opinions that went deeper than simply first impressions -- and I completely understand why they felt this was so urgent a concern; first impressions for most of the journos present were not positive. The thing is, as is often the case in this type of situation, once you delve deeper into the experience there is a deeper experience to have, and in the end I am convinced that none of the attendees present would have walked away with the intentions of restricting what they wrote to just their first impressions -- after all that is not what we do, and it is not what we are paid to do!
I am convinced that had our hosts simply maintained faith in the men and women that they had invited to the briefing -- that we would do more than simply take a brief look and then write about it -- the end result would have been just as informative but would not have the taint of being handled attached to it. After the briefing I gathered with the small group from the New England region -- most of them being writers I knew from other publications, and we found an Italian bistro in Manhattan (not hard to do) where we broke bread and discussed the experience that we had that morning -- and we all pretty much felt the same way.
Ignoring for the moment that none of us relished the experience of being handled by the PR's the important point is that we went away from the experience with a better understanding of what Microsoft was trying to accomplish with their new interface, and it was not the handful of fluff reasons that had previously been making the rounds online. The new Windows experience was not the representation of Microsoft's belief that PC consumers would be making the switch to tablet and touch-based computing in large numbers, and while the new interface does strongly leverage that sort of computing experience, it also works fine with a mouse. I am not going to head in the direction of exploring the intentions now -- that will come later -- but you should know that this new OS is not what it appears to be. Not at all.
-- A Radically New Interface --
At least part of the problem that Microsoft faced with their new OS was the issue revolving around its entirely new and different interface. The engineers in Redmond decided to make the next big thing in Windows an entirely new experience for the users, but in the doing of it they did not start out from a blank position -- in fact the interface is heavily influenced by a combination of the most popular mobile interfaces and the interface that is present on Microsoft's other big thing: the Xbox 360.
Describing the new interface in simple terms is.. Well... Simple. It is a screen that is made up of different sized square content-filled buttons that is virtually expandable by scrolling to the right, and inside of each square can be live and changing content that relates specifically to the program, app, or subject of the square. Before we go deeper into the meaning of all this, we should examine that last point.
The screen that holds all of those squares is called the "Start Screen" and it replaces the Start Button that Windows users are very familiar with -- in fact that is the most disturbing element of the changes that have taken place between Windows 7 and Windows 8 -- the entire point to that exercise being to take the most popular objects, apps, and programs (or actions) and give them a dedicated square within which content that is related to the subject can then be displayed.
A good example of this is the square that represents your photo folder on your hard drive. You know it is your photo folder because it is labeled "Photos" and because it morphs into a slide-show of your photos. That is actually a pretty cool feature assuming you do not also keep your collection of Dallas Cowboys Cheerleader photos in that directory folder -- if you do you may want to move it, because the square is very visible to anyone glancing at the screen. Just saying.
Other squares may contain news photos for the news square, gaming icons for the games square -- you should be getting the idea. The point to all of this is that in addition to representing a wide selection of the different types of uses that the average computer user puts their computer to, the Start Screen is meant to make accessing each of those tasks faster, since the user does not have to go looking inside nested menus or other folders to find the icon that they need to click on to run that app or function.
So far this is turning out to be a pretty slick idea, and if they had left it at that, and retained the basic structure of the desktop that most users are used to, this could have been a brilliant coup for the Windows Team. But they did not.
-- The Desktop as App --
Rather than retain the focus of the OS as a desktop-centric element, the desktop in Windows 8 appears as another app, complete with a square in the lower left corner of the Start Screen. This is an obvious destination if the user intends to run a program that belongs on the desktop, but once they open it a new series of surprises is in store, most of them not good.
The first and very obvious change is the absence of the Start Button. That may not sound like all that big a deal at first blush, but considering the fact that the Start Button on the previous versions of the OS was the literal "Go To Button" around which pretty much every aspect of using the computer was focused, it is a big deal indeed for most users. Primarily because their comfort level has been destroyed and the one constant and the element that they fully understood and appreciated the use and function of is now ripped out of the environment to great effect. What do I mean?
When you want to access the Administrative Tools on Windows, that process begins with the Start Button. When you want to run an app that does not (for whatever reason) have an icon on the Desktop, you use the Start Button. Reviewing the contents of a specific class of software was always accomplished via the Start Button -- the list goes on, but the bottom line is that this is no longer an available option and there is no way to get it back. The bulk of the complaints -- the very vocal and very angry complaints -- that we are seeing online this weekend (remember Windows 8 just launched yesterday) focus on this issue.
The thing is that as it turns out, with the new structure of Windows 8, the missing Start Button is really not that big a deal after all. Assuming you are willing to learn a different way of navigating your computer that is. Yeah, you read that right -- I am saying that the issue that has practically the entire computing world angry is really a non-issue.
The important thing to understand is that there has been a paradigm shift with respect to the entire desktop and its focus on the PC. The basic and fundamental position respective of it is altered to present the desktop as simply another tool element on the computer, and pushes it back to the position of being simply the home for apps that require a desktop, rather than being the focus for the PC. If that is confusing, stop and read it again, and think about what it is saying.
The idea is really to refocus our attention on how we use the computer and why we used it the way that we did -- and why we can use it in a new way, and benefit from that new way of thinking about the PC and its environment. If you are starting to gather the impression that I think Microsoft may have a point here, well, I do. That is not to say that I am a Microsoft fanboy -- I am not -- but I am also not the sort of tech weenie who dismisses something just because I don't like the way it was presented, and I especially am not going to discount a new idea simply because it flies in the face of what I am used to.
-- A Good Place to Pause --
There is a lot to take in with the new Windows, and this is as good a place to pause in this exploration as any. The lesson to be learned here is to start from a position of a new view, and getting used to the idea that change is not always bad, and not always good -- sometimes it is just necessary -- and in the case of the new interface for Windows 8, when you step back and look at the big picture (which by the time this series of posts is complete you will easily be able to do) it becomes a lot easier to appreciate the approach that has been taken, and the reasons for it -- issues we will start to examine in the next post...
The Thoughts of Unknown on Saturday, October 27, 2012 No comments:
. . . Bragging Rights?
Among the common daily responsibilities of the freelance writer (no matter what beat or beats they happen to write on) is the need to maintain a current portfolio that includes the most recent published pieces and as complete a listing as possible of their past work, with links to the original publication or the online version of the pieces if they are available, the idea being to provide the reader with a centralized and convenient searchable list to help them find what they are looking for or just keep tabs on you.
Some writers will throw everything that they write into their portfolio, on the presumption that their readers will want to read, well, everything that they write. Others cherry pick from their output, placing what amounts to an edited selection of what they consider to be the best of their work in the hands of their readers and (I suspect that this is the major point) into the hands of the odd editor who is perusing their portfolio with an eye towards offering them an assignment. The reality is that no matter how busy a freelancer is, new writing assignments are a lot like Jello; there is always room for more.
I take a slightly different approach to choosing what goes into my portfolio -- having adopted a simple rule that controls what gets added to the portfolio -- though I cannot take credit for it -- I picked it up from my friend and fellow writer David Rakoff, who recently passed away after a personal battle with cancer.
I originally met David through Captain Peter Whitfield, who at the time was the skipper of the P-Town Ferry. Peter is a fascinating character who is gregarious and outgoing and always pleased to make a new friend, which goes a long way towards explaining how he has a huge list of friends from literally all walks of life. While he is the consummate professional when it comes to the captaining of a vessel -- being a skilled veteran nautical expert and commander -- he is also a unique individual and one of that rare breed of human beings who you are better off having known, and I am sure that David felt the same way about Pete -- who he met while taking the ferry on a day-trip from P-Town to Plymouth.
We chatted via email for the most part, as David lived and worked out of New York City and I am on Cape Cod, but once or twice a year when I was in The City to cover an event we met for lunch, and it was at one of those meals that I asked him for advice about what to include in my writing portfolio.
"Put in everything you got paid to write; if an editor thought it was good enough to pay you for it, then it is good enough to include in your portfolio" he allowed.
So when I sat down to edit what would become the ongoing and constantly updated online version of my writing portfolio in place of writing samples and a list of published pieces it contained a complete list of every piece that I was paid to write. Each piece is linked to the online version and where the piece does not have an online version, it will appear as a PDF of the print version. While the end result was not a flood of extra work, it does generate a constant trickle of jobs I otherwise would not have, so in that respect I am happy to be able to say that it has generated enough extra work to make it a worthwhile effort with no regrets.
If you are a writer -- freelance or otherwise -- no matter what hat you wear or beat you write on, building your online portfolio by creating a listing of everything you were paid to write, with a link ideally to the online version at the publication that paid you to write it and therefore published it, if it exists, is the optimal format. Doing it that way not only provides editors with a nice selection of your work, but it also demonstrates that you are working, and hopefully it demonstrates your range and the topics on which you write as well as the different beats, and in addition to providing readers and those imaginary editors access to your work, it serves as a constant reminder that you are doing what you love. That being said you should also remember that your criteria is all of the pieces that you were paid to write, even the small and seemingly unimportant ones...
I mention all of this so that I can segue into a recent event that reminded me in no small way that it is very easy to overlook the little stuff while you work your way towards the bigger pieces, and largely due to a confrontation over my criticism of a review written by another freelancer I was reminded that I had allowed a significant gap to appear in my portfolio!
The event I am referring to has its roots in the fact that I recently reviewed the video game Damage Inc. Pacific Squadron WWII which is the freshman video game title from games peripheral maker Mad Catz (the game was actually developed by Aussie Games Studio Trickstar in conjunction with Mad Catz) and released on 28 August of this year for Microsoft Xbox, Sony PS3, and Windows PC.
I played and reviewed the Xbox 360 version, which was provided to me by Mad Catz for that purpose (you can read my review for Game On, "Damage Inc. Pacific Squadron WWII," and a review of the game for the online gaming pub Gaming Update, "Damage Inc. Pacific Squadron WWII -- Game Impressions" and the feature article "Damage Inc. Pacific Squadron WWII Adventures in Pre-Release Gaming" that was also written for Gaming Update.) and found it to be an interesting game with a lot of potential for online PVP and cooperative play.
With better than 30 hours of potential game play for the casual player interested in the single-player story mode, when that is completed should the gamer embrace the multi-player online side of the game its entertainment potential is practically unlimited, but using the standard system I employ to evaluate average playtime, the game scored a rather impressive Average Admission Price of just $1.24 an hour, which is well under the $2 per hour threshold which serves as the cost yardstick for modern retail boxed titles today.
After investing over 100 hours in game play time in order to obtain the full impression of the game prior to reviewing it, with roughly half of that time spent in the multi-player online PVP side of the game (OK I did indulge perhaps a bit more time than was entirely necessary, but I had a great group of games journos to play with who were also playing to review and we liked this game). After wrapping up game play Damage Inc. scored a solid 9.0 out of 10, and I was not alone in evaluating it and finding it to be quite the impressive air combat romp!
At its most basic the lack of a wide selection of air combat titles each year gave the game a boost by itself, but it was the quality of the entertainment offered by the game and not its cheesy story line that earned it that score, so you may be able to imagine my surprise when I encountered a negative review in the Manchester Guardian Newspaper written by freelance games journo Grant Howitt (Damage Inc. Pacific Squadron WWII -- Review, 31 August 2012 The Guardian) that was widely slammed by the writer and reviewer for reasons that instantly got my back up. (This was originally addressed in the September 1, 2012 blog entry "Speaking Of. . . Constructive Criticism").
To begin with, the review was written badly and lacked the professionalism and quality that we have come to expect from The Guardian. Note that I only read this review after I had written two of my own (linked above) and after I spent better than 100 hours in playing the game, which at that point I considered myself to be something of an expert on as a result...
Howitt's approach in his review appeared to intentionally substitute an overtly sarcastic voice in place of the to-be-expected serious opinion based upon lengthy and full game play for the title; in simple terms the piece began badly, worked its way towards horrible, and ended by demonstrating that the reviewer had not actually played the game for more than an hour or so (if that)!
Forget for a moment that you never begin a review by asking a question, once you read the first graph of the review you will feel strongly the desire to forget the question, but alas it is too late at that point. A game review should never make you wish longingly to be afflicted with Alzheimer's Disease, but really, there is a serious flaw in your approach when you open what is supposed to be a considered game review with the question:
"Do you know why American fared so badly at Pearl Harbor, leading to the deaths of thousands of men that would draw them into the killing fields of the second world war?"
I get it that America-bashing is presently in vogue for the younger generation of writers (read that as college-aged) in the UK, but actually I do know why America fared so badly following the Japanese invasion attempt of Pearl Harbor, and it was not "due to the fact that they placed the entirety of their airborne defence in the hands of a single inexperienced pilot who crashed explosively into nearby buildings at every opportunity" which is what Howitt would have us believe.
The failure at Pearl Harbor was actually caused by a combination of errors, oversights, and mistakes, not the least of which was the failure of the intelligence community at the time to properly analyze the data and the intercepted communications that it actually possessed; there is also the issue of the intelligence briefing that the British provided the United States Navy that was based upon the output of its Enigma decoding teams at Bletchley Park, just outside of Milton Keynes. (1)
There was the matter of nearly a full hour's advanced warning that was obtained from the Opana Radar Station on the North Shore of Oahu, which was an integral element in the new Aircraft Warning Service (AWS) that was established in 1939, and that was intended to do just what it did, which was provide advance warning of approaching waves of enemy bombers and torpedo planes as well as fighters, using its SCR-270 radar system and the skills of Army Privates Joe Lockhard and George Elliot, both of whom were at their appointed stations on the bluff overlooking the calm and gentle Pacific Ocean when at 0702 on Sunday, 7 December 1941, they detected several waves of incoming bombers and torpedo planes and correctly identified them as a threat. (1) (2)
They reported the sighting to the Duty Officer manning the Temporary Information Center at Fort Shafter, on Hawaii. That officer -- Army Lieutenant Kermit Tyler -- decided that what the pair had sighted on their radar was nothing more than a flight of twelve US Army Air Corps Boeing B-17 Bombers that was being ferried in from Muroc Army Air Base in Muroc, California (via Luzon, in the Philippine Islands) to Hawaii. The flight was made up of a mixture of elements from the 19th Bombardment Group (Heavy) and the 7th Bombardment Group (Heavy) and for the purposes of obtaining the maximum fuel range for the bombers, made the flight without any weapons or ammunition on board. (1)(3)
Then there were the monumental failures of Army General Walter C. Short, Hawaiian Department Commander, and Navy Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, the Pacific Fleet Commander at Pearl Harbor, both of whom failed to pay heed to the ample warnings that were issued by the Department of Defence and the coordinated efforts of both the British Intelligence Service and the US Department of State, all of whom warned that an attack was imminent and that basic defensive precautions should be taken to prepare the islands. (3)
It Wasn't Funny?
Of course the question that Howitt opened his review with was not serious; it was supposed to be humor, but sadly it flopped, and I suspect that part of the reason -- the obvious part of the reason -- for that has to do with its macabre and tactless nature and the reality that he chose a very poor subject and position for that humor.
That he feels it is appropriate to joke about the failed invasion and subsequent attack at Pearl Harbor suggest that Howitt has not the slightest familiarity with military service and why joking about the death of thousands of Solders, Sailors, and Marines not to mention civilian casualties really is not funny; in reality Howitt is just another Jody, but he doesn't even know it. If we could ask the victims of the attack I seriously doubt that they would see the humor either. It may be edifying to know that a total of 2,403 military personnel died during and immediately following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, with an additional 1,178 people (service and civilian) being injured in the attack. (4)
Damage Modeling adds to the game play experience...
Rehashing all of the faults with the review serves very little purpose, so restricting this to the more significant points, in reading the review it became very obvious from what Howitt wrote that (A) he had not played more than twenty minutes to an hour of the game; (B) he had not completed the tutorial phase of the game; (C) he had not mastered the controls; and (D) he was not familiar with the actual contents of the game.
One of the more annoying assertions that he made was that the game falsly claimed to be an historically faithful combat experience. Howitt complains in his review that the game claimed to be historically-based but then goes on to have the player face a number of enemy planes and shoot them down, thus obtaining more kills than the historic leading ace fighter pilot of the era, Army Air Corps pilot and Congressional Medal Winner Ira Bong, who at the time of Pearl Harbor was a Lieutenant.
Neither the developer or the publisher ever made any such claim; what they said was that the game featured historically accurate aircraft, and it does. Howitt made gross unfounded and unsupported assumptions based upon his own interpretation of blurbs from the back of the box, and then took a position based upon his interpretation, characterizing his imagination as factual statements by the developer and publisher. Ultimately after reading what he wrote I came to the realization that Howitt had written the review about a game he had not actually played, and yes, that really got my knickers in a twist, I freely admit it.
"You don't by any chance happen to have six fingers on your right hand?"
Under normal circumstances when I encounter a situation in which a fellow member of the Fourth Estate has firmly jammed a foot into their own mouth, I will watch (amused, not amused, it all depends upon the circumstances) and let it go at that -- rarely do I actually get involved, and still rarer is the violation such that I feel compelled to wiegh in on the situation personally. When it does come to that however, I much prefer to privately share my opinion with them because I find that in most cases a sincerely offered piece of personal advice is more readily accepted -- unfortunately in the case of Grant Howitt and his review of Damage Inc. Pacific Squadron WWII the fact that he has gone to considerable efforts to conceal his personal email address, and has chosen not to offer a business email or postal address meant that the only option for all communications with him was via the public channels that he has created -- basically that meant either posting to his Twitter Account, or posting a comment to the actual review on The Guardian website.
Since what I needed to say naturally required more than the 140 character limits on the service, unless I was willing to generate a literal Tweetstorm, the official comments section on The Guardian Website was the only practical option. The choice of making the criticism public required a mental review of the reasons I was irritated enough to actually take the boy to task for what he had done -- so that was the next necessary step. Thinking about it helped focus it.
In the end my ire took the form of a rather lengthy and detailed comment to his review on the Guardian website -- and it was largely constructive -- addressed all of the areas of concern, and resulted in his telling me where to head in.
What Howitt did to warrant a reaction was flagrantly violate the trust that exists between the writer/reviewer and the reader; he also compromised the ethical commitment between a writer and their publication and in the doing of that, sacrificed a measure of the trust that The Guardian has built with its readers since it began to offer game reviews -- in essence Howitt chose to burn a bridge when it was not only not his bridge to burn, but a bridge that should not have been put to the torch in the first place.
Those two crimes are reasonably egregious and sufficient to warrant the level of response that I made to him, but it was his third transgression that really made the matter terminal. By taking an assignment that he never intended to properly complete, Howitt took a job away from another writer who would have legitimately reviewed the game! Considering the economy and the fact that paying gigs are not like apples on a tree anymore (if they ever were) it would have been better for all concerned if that review assignment had gone to a writer who was prepared to commit to doing it right -- and there are plenty (hell, almost every freelancer out there) who would have and could have done a better job. In fact this is one of those cases where ten monkeys on typewriters... Just saying.
Grant Howitt and his Zombie LARP Startup - hit over to Zombie LARP for more information! And thanks Grant!
The Newspaper Industry
Will take care of itself. But in the interim I owe Grant a note of thanks because, coming full circle here, he pointed out a gap in my portfolio that I have since fixed. Thank you Grant!
Shortly after I posted my comment on Grant's review the admins at The Guardian locked all further comments on that review, and Grant took his disparagement to Twitter, where it is clear from his comments that he visited my website (I was flattered that he felt the need) but in the doing of it he seems to have found it wanting. Sigh.
Specifically he declared that he always considers the source when someone offers him constructive criticism, and that in considering the source (me), he felt that as he was a video game reviewer, and I was a newspaper columnist, my opinion on the matter did not carry any real or informed weight, since according to Grant I had no familiarity with the subject of writing video game reviews, or gaming in general.
It was at that point that I realized that I had failed to include a significant element of my writing in my portfolio! It was at that point that I realized that Grant had actually helped me to recognize that gap, and so had prompted me to correct it. It was at that point that I realized that Grant had helped me. It was at that point that I realized I owed Grant a debt of thanks.
While my portfolio did include the 41 video game guides and walkthroughs that I have written over the years, it did not include the more than 250 game reviews that I had written over the years! Thanks to Grant I was now aware of that fact; but it seems that as Grant was not, and taking into account his assertion that -- his feeling that -- his eleven game reviews published on The Guardian website represents a clear and authoritative background and presence, he felt that he spoke from a position of strength and expert opinion (compared to me) with respect to video games and I was just going to have to accept that....
So what was the lesson that I took away from all of this?
Well, clearly there is the fact that I considered the game reviews to be unimportant -- I must have done so, because I failed to include ANY of them in my portfolio in spite of the fact that by my own standards they clearly belong there!
After giving it careful thought and consideration I have come to the conclusion that because they are all comparatively small next to many of the feature pieces and guides that I had written, I have been subconsciously undervaluing them all along!
Clearly they are not.
So I must ask myself: How is an editor going to know that I review games if I fail to provide that information to them as part of my online portfolio?
That second generation of questions immediately made me wonder what other assets I had neglected to include in my portfolio? I have to give that some thought.
And that brings me full circle, and back to the fact that I owe Grant a note of thanks for helping me to see that I had (have?) a weakness in my approach to documenting my writing. Thanks Grant! And good luck with your new Live Action Role Playing Game Business thingy!
The Thoughts of Unknown on Monday, October 15, 2012 No comments:
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Earl Young (The Trammps)
Earl Young, the creator of the Disco beat in 1972 from which the House, Techno, EDM, Trance dance music genres all were born - the music equal to Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, such has the work of both men changed how we interact in the world we live in today.
I was most fortunate to interview Earl for over an hour at the CDJ Show in Toronto, Canada March 10th 2017 at the Hilton Hotel, where he gave a personal demonstration of how he created the 4 to 4 disco beat for the song "The Love I Lost". It was fantastic to meet Earl and his wife of 34 years Sylvia.
Earl started his life living in foster homes as he explained his journey and his love of music. Again we witness the goodness of music as a healing power which, like so many other stories, literally saves peoples lives, mine included.
The one on one interview was a life moment for me personally as I remember being totally drawn to the 1973 song "The Love I Lost" by Harold Melvin & The Bluenotes on Philadelphia International Records, its sad story of letting go of a real love. Then years later realising that the beat of the song was at 120bpm so was perfect to be re-covered for the dance floor again. In 1993 West End feat Sybil took the song back to the UK singles chart, narrowly missing the #1 spot, peaking at #3 whilst hitting #1 in the UK Club Charts where it stayed for 5 weeks.
Earl Young (born June 2, 1940, Philadelphia) is a Philadelphia-based drummer who rose to prominence in the early 1970s as part of the Philly Soul sound. Young is best known as the founder and leader of The Trammps who had a hit record with "Disco Inferno". Young, along with Ronnie Baker and Norman Harris (the trio best known as Baker-Harris-Young), was the owner of the Golden Fleece record label.
Young is seen as the inventor of the disco style of rock drumming (in Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes's "The Love I Lost" from 1973), as he was the first to make extensive and distinctive use of the hi-hat cymbal throughout the playing time of an R & B recording. This led to DJs favoring his recordings because they could hear the cymbal quite easily in their headphones as they "cued up" records to be mixed.
In the mid-sixties Young played drums on many recordings for the Philadelphia-based record label "ARCTIC" (Records), on which his own band "The Volcanos" (later formed to The Trammps) was signed (e.g. The Ambassadors - Ain't Got The Love Of One Girl (On My Mind), Della Humphrey - Let's Wait Until Dark, Kenny Gamble - The Jokes on you, in 1969 the whole Ambassadors LP "Soul Summit"). He also played for the Philadelphia-based record label "Phil L.A. Of Soul" on "Cliff Nobles & Co. - Love Is All Right (The Horse) in 1968 (a Jesse Martin production), a popular Northern Soul classic.
Young featured prominently on many Philadelphia International Records (PIR) recordings before moving on to Salsoul Records as part of the house band for the label. He recorded extensively at Philadelphia's Sigma Sound Studios as part of the group of musicians knows as MFSB. In a 2005 interview with Modern Drummer magazine, bassist Anthony Jackson was asked whether he recalled working with Young: "Yes, of course. That was back in the days when I was working with Gamble & Huff in Philadelphia. I didn't get to do too much with Earl because I was usually playing with Billy Paul's band, and Norman Farrington was on drums. But as I continued working for Gamble & Huff, I did a few sessions with Earl. My big Earl project was the O'Jays' 'For The Love Of Money.' I was astounded by his power. It may not come through on the records, but he is an ass-kicker. Listen to a classic Earl Young track like Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes' 'If You Don't Know Me By Now.' There's no click track. Earl had the drummer's equivalent of perfect pitch. I only saw the term referred to once, and it's called 'infallible rhythm.' Nobody has absolutely perfect time, but you find people like Buddy Rich and Tony Williams who can play without the time drifting. I've also seen studio drumming great James Gadson demonstrate infallible rhythm. I've seen him overdub drums on a track without a click track, and it's just perfect. I haven't spoken to Earl Young since we cut that record, but I've never forgotten those sessions. Earl stands as one of the great drummers. I'll never forget the impact that he made.".
In 1989, newcomers Ten City sought out Young to work on their first album for the house music scene, and even commissioned Young to remix of some of the material and as a session drummer.
In September 2008, Young joined some other ex-MFSB musicians on the Carl Dixon/Bobby Eli session at Eli's Studio E in Philadelphia where four new songs were recorded. The rhythm section included Young, Eli, Dennis Harris (the cousin of the Philadelphia guitarist Norman Harris) on guitar, Jimmy Williams (bass guitar), T Conway (keyboards) and Rikki Hicks (percussion). Vocalists on the session were the Philadelphia harmony group Double Exposure performing "Soul Recession", and Chiquita Green.
Young is honored by the Philadelphia Music Alliance (PMA) with total of five bronze plaques at the Walk of Fame on Broad Street. He is recognized as a member of the Trammps, the peerless rhythm section Baker, Harris & Young, along with the Philadelphia International Records studio orchestra MFSB and the Salsoul Orchestra, as well as John Davis & the Monster Orchestra.
Earl's Disco beat creation
Here's some the classic Trammps songs including the unforgettable Disco Inferno which was originally a 20 minute remix after the legendary Tom Moulton had finished with his remix work in the Sigma Sound Studios in the US city of Philadelphia.
Disco Inferno:
Zing Went The Strings If My Heart
Pray All You Sinners
Hold Back The Night
Love Epidemic
Trusting Heart
Trammps Disco Theme
Hooked For Life
That's Where The Happy People Go
Soul Searchin' Time
Ninety-Nine And A Half
I Feel Like I've Been Livin' (On The Dark Side Of The Moon)
Soul Bones
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David Joselit | Against Representation
Keywords: after art, art objects, Casey Kaplan, David Andrew Tasman, david joselit, Eric Garner, gradient, Kevin Beasley, undercommons
In conversation with David Andrew Tasman
Images courtesy Kevin Beasley
Kevin Beasley, …ain’t it?, 2014, Hooded sweatshirt, resin, 21 x 37 x 2.5″ / 53.3 x 94 x 6.4cm, photo: Jean Vong, Courtesy of the artist and Casey Kaplan, New York
During February and March of 2015, David Andrew Tasman met with David Joselit to discuss his recent essays, “Material Witness” and “The Art Effect,” as well as the tragic death of Eric Garner, the limits of institutional critique, and art’s capacities beyond representation.
David Andrew Tasman: In your recent essay in Artforum, “Material Witness,” you articulate the outrage many of us have felt in light of ongoing U.S discrimination and police brutality, contextualizing recent events to reflect on visual politics. Is your recommendation to be “skeptical of the ideological promises of representation,” in regards to the video of Eric Garner’s murder, an indictment of image or format?
David Joselit: To assess the efficacy of an image requires a definition of what we mean by success. I’ve been dismayed by the claims for image effects that seem exorbitant while also missing what an image can actually do. In the case of the video showing Garner being assaulted, the fact that his choking was recorded but didn’t lead to the outcome expected — namely, an indictment of the police officer involved — is an instance of the difference between what an image seems to show and what it can actually do. Art can occupy that space. What I define as a “format” in After Art is a strategy for activating the space between what an image shows and what an image does. Thinking about the real-world effects of images, including art images, results in two questions. Are images doing what you want them to do in a particular context? And, if they aren’t, does their format become increasingly relevant? The artwork almost always contains vestiges of what might be called the roots — or infrastructural extensions — of its entanglements in the world. These might include the means of production of the image, the human effort that brought it into being, its mode of circulation, the historical events that condition it, etc. The artwork’s format solidifies and makes visible that connective tissue, reinforcing the idea that the work of art encompasses both an image and its extensions. The term format does not merely distinguish between digital vs. analog, as medium might do, but points to how an image is situated within a set of relations that condition how efficacious it may be. Formats attract attention and exercise power. The difference between format and medium lies largely in the heterogeneity of the components — aesthetics, data, history, the scene of an action — which is anathema to traditional concepts of medium. When Bruno Latour talks about assemblages, he is talking about linkages — not the abstract infinity of a network. It’s difficult to quantify the limits of extension, for instance, one must think about what is folded into images as well as what extends out from them.
Kevin Beasley, Untitled (stack), 2015, Polyurethane foam, resin, soil, house dresses, t-shirts, studio debris, soil, 48 x 27 x 20″ / 121.92 x 68.58 x 50.80cm, photo: Jean Vong, Courtesy of the artist and Casey Kaplan, New York
DAT: In your essay “Material Witness,” as one strategy to increase the legibility of these extensions, you cite Eyal Weizmann and Anselm Franke’s interest in Quintilian’s concept of “the mediated speech of inanimate objects.” Is this concept a critique of Bruno Latour’s “Parliament of Things,” or New Materialism and Post-humanism, in support of Vibrant Matter, Biopolitics, and Speculative Realism?
DJ: Well, these theories are complex, quite diverse and often contradictory in their positions. What I think they do share, however, is an effort to understand the agency of objects (politically, socially, materially), and a commitment to de-centering the importance of human perception in conceiving of the world. One of the important things I take away from this is that we need to change our habit of thinking that art objects stand for something else; that their primary function is to represent. Instead, these objects act in various ways, including provoking future events or effects. Representing is always retrospective: something has to pre-exist the art object in order to be re-presented. I think art’s special capacity is, on the contrary, its futurity.
Kevin Beasley, Movement IV, 2015, Vintage Steinway piano, mixing console, effects processors, di-boxes, speakers, cables, 61 x 28 x 28″ / 154.94 x 71.12 x 71.12cm, 30 x 20 x 14″ / 76.20 x 50.80 x 35.56cm, 89 x 42 x 16″ / 226.06 x 106.68 x 40.64cm, photo: Jean Vong, Courtesy of the artist and Casey Kaplan, New York
Kevin Beasley, Untitled, 2015, Polyurethane foam, resin, grey jeans, underwear, studio debris, 47 x 17 x 20″ / 119.38 x 43.180 x 50.80 cm, photo: Jean Vong, Courtesy of the artist and Casey Kaplan, New York
DAT: How might this paradigm shift inflect modes of cultural production or the politics of art? Is there a wish for these kinds of actions to spill over outside of the art context?
DJ: I’ve changed my opinion on that quite a bit over time. When art moves outside of its own context it loses some of the power that is sustained through its connection to art institutions. The desire to go outside that context is also an implicit statement that the art world isn’t a place where power relations exist in a material way. In After Art, I argued that, while the art world in fact shouldn’t be elided with the world of enterprise or politics, it is in fact a realm of enormous cultural and economic power. Paradoxically, it seems to me that standard Institutional Critique has all but drifted away from engaging with the terms of the actual institutions that support art right now — in part because such critique has found such a welcome place in museums and galleries. The most potent examples I can recall in recent years have interrogated the conditions of labor for art handlers, or for the builders of museums and universities in the Persian Gulf. I wonder if a more productive mode than Institutional Critique is what the DIS collective is doing — which is to mobilize a potentially new model instead of critiquing existing ones. That seems to me ultimately where the future lies.
Kevin Beasley, Untitled (Jumped Man), 2014. Whitney Biennial 2014, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, March 7- May 25, 2014. Collection of the artist. Photograph by Bill Orcutt.
DAT: The line between transparency and opacity may in fact be a gradient. On the one hand transparency seems to operate within a sort of journalistic critical method, while opacity potentially operates within a mobilized form of communication or action. You conclude “Material Witness” with some doubts that the forensic image will be able to speak, coupled with a sanguine reference to Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s concept of “the undercommons,” described in their 2013 eponymous book on one occasion as a space where, “the aim is not to support the general antagonism but to experiment its informal capacity.” What role can art have in, or learn from, the “undercommons”?
DJ: Since the rise of identity politics and its important achievements of the 1990s, and later through the writing of Jacques Rancière, there has been a strong association between visibility — or becoming visible — and political claims. Harney and Moten argue for the use-value of remaining outside of representation (and incidentally, so has Hito Steyerl in some of her recent works and writings). There are a lot of opaque spaces that art has the capacity to indicate and activate. Since right now almost anything can be monetized or rendered as information, we are all harvested and profiled as information-capital. Occlusions and opacities might be a means of protecting oneself from such economic forms of alienability or alienation. I think your term gradient is very helpful in this regard. The gradient of consumability is a powerful differential at a moment where the primary goal of a neoliberal system is to make things easy to consume; I think that art can forestall or at least slow down such easy consumption.
DAT: In your recent piece, “Art Effects” for The Cairo Review you present flickers of optimism in your assurance that art may also “participate in the formation of civil society […] putting into form new spaces of public interaction.” Do you see a similarity between the space described in Ariella Azoulay’s “citizenry of photography” and Harney and Moten’s “undercommons?”
DJ: Yes. I think that art has always been able to constitute spaces and publics that were not necessarily anticipated by its makers or commissioners — this is part of what I mean by art’s futurity. I think that seeing images of Apartheid, for instance, made a huge difference in mobilizing opposition to that system outside of South Africa. South African photographers addressed not just their own communities through their work, but the world, and this allowed pressure to be exerted from outside. If we live more and more in images, images attain more and more new powers. The question is how to experiment with such power, how to learn to use it for something other than accumulating capital.
Kevin Beasley, Untitled (Focus Black Boy I), 2015, Resin, wood, t-shirts, television mount, 70 x 70 x 16″/ 177.8 x 177.8 x 40.64cm, photo: Jean Vong, Courtesy of the artist and Casey Kaplan, New York
Kevin Beasley, Untitled (Focus Black Boy II), 2015, Resin, wood, t-shirts, jordan jacket, television mount, 70 x 70 x 16″/ 177.8 x 177.8 x 40.64cm, photo: Jean Vong, Courtesy of the artist and Casey Kaplan, New York
David Joselit is a historian, critic, educator and former curator. Prior to joining The Graduate Center at the City University of New York as a Distinguished Professor, Joselit taught at Yale University in the Department of Art History for a decade, where from 2006 to 2009 he served as department Chair. A prolific and at times polarizing writer, he has authored and edited many books and essays including the widely read After Art, and “Painting Beside Itself.” He is an editor at the journal October, and regular contributor to Artforum. Joselit received his Ph. D from Harvard University in 1995 and lives in New York with his longtime partner, Steve Incontro and their dog Joey.
Kevin Beasley is an artist working in multiple mediums including sculpture, performance, and photography. In the winter of 2015 he opened his first solo exhibition in New York at Casey Kaplan gallery. His work has recently been included in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, The Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. In 2014 he was included in the Whitney Biennale, and Cut to Swipe at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Beasley is also part of the collective All Gold whose members include artists, Golnaz Esmaili, Inva Cota and Stephen Decker. All Gold is currently the inaugural resident of the MoMA PS1 Print Shop.
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Internationales Licht Kunst Projekt
Updates COLLUMINA 2018
March 22 to 24, 2018
Tilen Sepič: Komposing with Frequencies
Tilen Sepič is an explorative designer and artist. In his transdisciplinary practice, he refers to natural and social sciences, material and technological developments, ethical and esthetical aspects. He analyses material properties and interrelations, key functions and system structures, physical and sensual phenomena. His imagery, his objects, and installations are illustrations, sensory fields or perceptual spaces that stage complex contexts. An example, the “Eclipse” _ a luminaire object that shows the simultaneous presence and absence of light was awarded the London “darc award” in 2014. “In my artistic examination of photography and videography, I first became aware of the importance of natural light and later also of electric light. I like the medium because it is not so “formal” in the sense of the material. It’s much more than just material.” Currently, he is concerned with visual and non-visual light effects, i.e. he concentrates on how light influences seeing, thinking and well-being and how it modifies mood, experience, and behavior.
Since 2006 he has been working as a freelanced designer, in 2013 he was invited to the SVETLOBNA GVERILA festival in Ljubljana for the first time with an art intervention, since then he has been regularly represented at design, light and science festivals in Europe. “What I like about the exhibitions in public space is that they are accessible to everyone. Everyone can experience the work and collectively we own the multitude of experiences with the work _ so it should be with all artistic formats and also with all knowledge”. In Hildesheim, he presented a site-specific variation of the installation “Light Oscillator” which was shown before at the festivals of light SVETLOBNA GVERILA Ljubljana [2016], LUMINA Cascais [2017] and LICHTUNGEN Hildesheim [2018], among others.
The kinetic installation is inspired by the observation of vibrating systems with periodic behavior, such as known in physics and chemistry, biology, and sociology. These are mechanical systems that oscillate continuously between different states. Technical oscillators can be found in mechanical and electrical engineering. The installation is structured like a design drawing of an oscillator. It consists of several light globes, each with its own light pulse. Their lights dim on and off and follow regularly repeating sequences. Suspended from high trees, the three light globes float freely in space, set in motion each by a small motor. Thus, the three conical pendulums are created in spatial proximity, but they do not touch each other’s radius but depending on the point of view, their paths seem to cross. The result is a visual tension that turns the technical set-up into an aesthetic phenomenon.
The acoustic space is played on with a superimposed frequency spectrum which creates a kind of abstract ambient space. In its interplay, it recalls the “Dream House” (1993) by Marian Zazeela and La Monte Young, a light and sound environment that fills the audio-visual space with compositions of light and sound frequencies. Since the beginning of the 19060s, light, color, and space have been at the center of Marian Zazeela’s artistic practice. She explains that “sound and light can be experienced together as a new form or new medium: the sound and light environment. Experiencing the two media together requires a new or at least a different kind of attention”. Atlas Obscura: Dream House. No date given. Like her partner, the composer and musician Monte Young, she experiments with temporal duration and periodic repetition. Their joint, multi-hour concerts are legendary: “A one-hour composition is nothing compared to a six-year composition. [Randy Kennedy: Young and Zazeela’s “Dream House” Is Getting a New Lease at Dia. Checked on 2.4.2018.]. Like the “Dreamhouse”, the “Light Oscillator” creates a hypnotic situation that arises through synchronized audio-visual interaction over an open amount of time. The viewers’ eyes follow the endlessly circling lights, the ears tune in to the frequency structure and the surrounding space becomes a kind of shell for the oscillation system.
Therefore, the choice of location is of great importance. It needs clear height and width to create sufficient space for the pendulum movements and the visual relations. “As an artist, I try to work with the existing space and use its potential to create another story in the timeline of that space. I’m trying to integrate seamlessness.”
All statements: Tilen Sepič. Text: Bettina Pelz. Köln, March 15, 2018.
COLLUMINA _ Haus der Stiftungen / Galerie Seippel _ Zeughausstrasse 26 _ D-50667 Köln _ info@collumina.de
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